


The Water Under the Golden Gate

by roaroftheninth



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-11-27 06:38:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 53,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roaroftheninth/pseuds/roaroftheninth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eduardo’s father dies. Twelve days later, Eduardo jumps from the Golden Gate bridge. Neither of these things are the beginning or the end of this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Bridge

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Вода под Голден Гейт](https://archiveofourown.org/works/710779) by [LadyOfTheFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyOfTheFlowers/pseuds/LadyOfTheFlowers)



> This story was written for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which means I wrote 50,000+ words in thirty days. I have done some editing, but please bear with me if you find any errors/plot gaps/etc! The whole premise of the story came from Sean Parker's tale about the man behind Victoria's Secret - "This is a once in a generation Holy Shit idea - and the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold." After that, well, it just took on a mind of its own!

\--

 

Eduardo’s father dies. Twelve days later, Eduardo jumps from the Golden Gate bridge.

 

Neither of these things are the beginning or the end of this story.

 

\--

Some of the things Eduardo says during the depositions are not entirely accurate. He has never expressly _lied_ , of course, never said anything that could be construed as perjury. He’s not stupid. He also knows that every word of his side of the story will be weighed against Mark’s, and as such, he treads carefully. He and Mark may have perceived things differently, but the framework of their experiences is the same, and Eduardo doesn’t need to invent things anyway. He knows that the narrative will show that he deserves a piece of Facebook in the end. He won’t get all of it, like he promised, and neither he nor Mark will go home happy after the settlement, but such is life.

 

No, Eduardo has never lied, but he has embellished the story in little ways. He drops lines that he knows will paint a sympathetic portrait of himself as the wronged best friend and Mark as the one with blood on his hands, ruthlessly guarding his thirty pieces of silver. He says things like, _I was your only friend_ and _My father won’t even look at me._ He knows that Mark sees these things for what they are, and maybe the lawyers can tell a little bit too, but of course they weren’t there, and whatever they pick up second-hand and spin is just inference and speculation.

 

Eduardo, of course, has never been Mark’s only friend. Dustin and Chris joke about being reluctant to admit that they are on cordial terms with Mark, but they stuck with him after the lawsuit and Eduardo knows that either of them would go to bat for Mark any day of the week.

 

As for Eduardo’s father... well, that part is not entirely untrue, even if Eduardo says it so that it has an emotional impact, so that Mark will understand how deep this wound goes. Ricardo Saverin had called his son the day after the lawsuit was filed and exploded at him. Eduardo had been sitting in Boston, in his cramped single dorm room, and he had literally put the phone down on the bed and leaned over it, rocking slightly, eyes closed, as his father’s furious, staccato Portuguese had washed over him.

 

Eduardo always thinks, _Portuguese is my heart language._ It is the language his mother speaks, and his cousins, and it reminds him of home – not even Miami, but Brazil.

 

But Portuguese is also his prison, because his father traps him in layers of it, pinning Eduardo down with outbursts and even silences. No one has ever humiliated him, made him miserable, in English (not until Mark, but by then Eduardo’s perception of the world is already fleshed out and nothing Mark does can change the fundamental truth that painful memories and Portuguese go hand in hand).

 

So when his father calls him to tell him that he was a _stupid, stupid_ boy for letting Facebook slip through his fingers, Eduardo hates the sound of the words, the very shape of them, as they come rolling over the phone line.

 

It is less than two weeks later when he desperately wants to hear it again. But by then there is total radio silence from his parents’ house; even his mãe doesn’t call, although Eduardo knows that it’s not of her own volition. He flies home one weekend and his father lets him into the house, but the old man ignores him for the duration of his stay. It makes Eduardo ache at the same time as it infuriates him, because everything he’s ever done has been for his father’s benefit.

 

And the two people in his life whose opinions he has always valued most (because positive opinions are hard to come by, with them) are both coldly furious with him; Mark, from across a board room table, and Ricardo Saverin, from 1,500 miles away.

 

Eduardo doesn’t actually know what to do with this, but he does something with it anyway, because he has to.

 

When the depositions finally end, Eduardo finds himself at loose ends. Degree in hand, he starts investing in tech start-ups, but he feels restless, like something is missing.

 

It occurs to him that maybe something will always be missing, but he tries not to let that thought settle in and take root. If it does, it will infect him, like a poison.

 

Every so often, he receives a call from home. Picking up the phone is like Russian roulette, because Eduardo doesn’t know which parent it will be. When it is his mother, they talk about how much she misses him and whether he’s happy and if he thinks he might be home for Chanukah. They are conversations that leave him painfully missing her, so the end result is not much better than that from a call from his father. Those are admittedly few and far between, since his father doesn’t seem to have much to say to him these days. When they do speak, it is vicious and brief; Eduardo mostly listens while his father talks.

 

One day, after one such phone call, Eduardo wrenches off the family ring his father gave him at thirteen and leaves it on the kitchen counter for three days. Before this, he never took it off, not even to shower. He knows what it would mean to lose it.

 

On the third day, Eduardo puts the ring in an envelope and mails it to Florida, where he assumes that his father picks it up at the post office. He doesn’t know. He checks to see if someone has signed for it at the other end, and someone has, but Eduardo never hears anything about it.

 

Eduardo does wonder if his action bore some kind of symbolism for their relationship, though, because his father doesn’t call again after that.

 

Eduardo doesn’t notice at first, because he still gets calls from his mother and often _expects_ it to be his father, but he begins to realize that it never is anymore.

 

Then, one day, shortly after he has moved to Singapore (because he doesn’t care where he gets a new beginning, and Singapore is one of the best places in the world to do business) Eduardo gets a phone call and it is like the world has ended.

 

His father is dead.

 

He was fifty-nine; it was a stroke, and as it is with such things, no one had seen it coming.

 

Eduardo sits on the floor in his living room and dimly listens to his sister recount how it happened, how their mother came home from the grocery store to find her husband collapsed in the front hallway. He was gone even before she called the paramedics. He was _fifty-nine._

 

Eduardo is in disbelief. He and his father haven’t spoken in months, and when they were on speaking terms, they were not close. Eduardo can’t remember his father taking him to the park or congratulating him for a soccer game well-played. But it doesn’t matter, because Ricardo Saverin was his father, and Eduardo had always just sort of wanted one thing from him.

 

It is too late for that now, though. Now is the time to pick out a black suit – one among many; Eduardo looks good in black – and a tie and fly south for the funeral. Eduardo has never asked, but he is reasonably certain that he has been cut out of the will.

 

Eduardo is asked to speak at the funeral. His sister rises first, because she is a year and a half older, and says something flowery but mostly vague about the kind of man their father was. When she sits down, she grips Eduardo’s hand tightly. He is fairly certain that it is a warning.

 

Eduardo doesn’t know what she thinks he will say. He makes comments like, _My father was a hard man_ and _We weren’t always close_ , comments that allow him to express his grief that things weren’t different without publicly tearing down his father’s memory. At the end, his mother gives a tiny nod of approval, although his sister still looks like she isn’t sure that it is enough.

 

It will have to be, because Eduardo literally does not have a single thing more in his soul to give. He had already been exhausted, worn right to the bone from his long battle with Mark. Now he is simply going through the motions; laying a rose on the coffin before it is lowered into the ground; speaking the little Hebrew he knows when it’s expected of him; straightening his tie as they start back across the cemetery.

 

Eduardo wants to _sleep_ for about a hundred years. When he gets home, he puts on his pajamas and crawls under the covers, watching reality shows until his eyes drift shut of their own volition. Still, his sleep is interrupted by nightmares, and he suffers for a few days, unwilling and unable to get out of bed. His grief is heavier than he had anticipated it would be, too heavy to lift on his own, and it is self-evident that there is no one there to help him with it.  

 

He manages to wrangle himself a prescription for sleeping pills, powerful ones, and he starts taking them in twos and threes. It feels like he has spent months like this, dream-like, since his father’s death, but in reality it has been just over a week at this point. Eduardo stops taking calls from his mother and sister and tells himself, _it’s your life, you don’t have to work, you do what you want with your time_ , and he knows he can get away with it because of the ludicrous amount of zeroes after the total in his bank account.

 

The money makes him feel exactly 0.1% better. The 0.1% is because it enables him to do just this without worrying about whether he’s financially solvent. Otherwise, he could not care less. The money was not what he wanted when he went after Mark, went after Facebook. It was _an_ objective, yes, but it was not _the_ objective, and as time went on, Eduardo had realized that it wasn’t even a particularly important objective.

 

He had wondered at first if that was what he wanted; a forum to get back at Mark, and he thinks that that was part of it too. But something, deep down, knows that Eduardo wanted to be part of Facebook because he wanted to be an irrevocable part of Mark’s life. And now Eduardo can’t imagine why he even ever thought that that would be a good idea, since Mark doesn’t give a shit about the things in his life beyond Facebook, and besides, you can’t change someone just by loving or hating them enough.

 

On the tenth day after his father’s death, Eduardo starts to wonder what would happen if he just never left his condo again.

 

Would anyone notice, he wonders? The phone no longer rings; his mother and sister have apparently bought his lies about how everything is okay, really, he’s just busy. They’re giving him his space, like he asked. And he doesn’t have any close friends, none who have kept in really close touch while he travels mostly aimlessly, this way and that across the country and the globe.

 

He hasn’t had a girlfriend – or boyfriend – to get on his case in awhile now.

 

Even his landlord wouldn’t come looking; Eduardo has his rent automatically deducted every month. It’s the same for his phone, electricity, and hydro bills. He could probably order takeout every night and sit in front of the television until he can come up with a reason to do anything else.

 

He doesn’t really want to examine too closely why this is burying him so much. He and his father had had a complex relationship, and Eduardo has never had a moment where he’s thought, with any kind of clarity, _I really love my dad._ It’s simply not the way they were.

 

For some reason, though, he is grieving, really _grieving_ this time, and a part of him wonders if this is partly Mark’s fault; that if he hadn’t lost both of them in the same year, his best friend and his father, he might have been okay.

 

Not that this wholly makes sense. Really, he lost Mark years ago, when he smashed the laptop and everything else crashed down, too. But the lawsuit being settled had a note of finality to it; a departure, and an ending.

 

On the eleventh day after his father’s death, in a haze of sleeping pills and alcohol, Eduardo gets the notification on his phone, reminding him:

 

_Facebook shareholder’s meeting, tomorrow, 11 am._

 

And for whatever reason, it is the motivation Eduardo needs to drag himself out of bed and into the shower. He leans his forehead against the wall as the too-hot spray rolls over him, penetrating the matted tangles in his hair and five days’ worth of accumulated sweat and grime. He still feels shaky and awful when he gets out, but there’s something about a shower that makes the world a marginally easier place to face.

 

Dressing methodically, he chooses a tailored grey suit this time, and a white shirt with a pink pocket square and black Hugo Boss shoes. It’s meaningless, he knows, they’re just clothes, but for some ridiculous reason it comforts him to know that he can still coordinate an outfit; that he can haul himself out of bed after five miserable days and still look stylish and fit for human consumption.

 

He chooses his clothes with care for San Francisco. He doesn’t bring any black suits, because he’s not officially in mourning (and what even is that anyway, it’s so medieval, and he and his father weren’t even close). He brings matching belts and shoes, chooses a long, dark jacket for the windy San Francisco weather, and folds everything neatly into a single suitcase. Then he tidies up a little around his apartment, changes the sheets, and puts his laundry away. When he leaves, he finds himself looking back, like he might not see it again. It looks like a stranger’s apartment. Eduardo wonders if the bad memories from the last week will always live there.

 

He touches down at SFO late in the evening the next day – it’s a long flight from Singapore – and checks immediately into a hotel. He lies in bed for a long time with the kick-in of a hangover buzz starting around his temples. Taking three extra-strength Advil (which is, quite frankly, two more than he needs), Eduardo waits for the edge to dull on his headache. When it finally does, he falls asleep with the light on. He has two alarms set, and when the sun rises the first of them goes off. Eduardo wakes up immediately, but he lies in bed and watches the minutes tick past until the second one goes off.

 

He has a slow, vague realization: There is literally nothing to get up for.

 

Yesterday, going to the shareholder’s meeting had seemed like some kind of necessary contact with the outside world. He would see – Mark, yes, but also Chris and Dustin, and he would be reminded that at some point, people had liked him, even valued his opinion, and things had been better. Now, Eduardo knows that this is false. He is not going to get the kind of validation he needs from seeing friends who aren’t really friends anymore, and the one person who started him on the downward spiral that is the last couple of years of his life.

 

Eduardo eventually gets up anyway, and he puts on his suit and his Hugo Boss shoes and his pocket square, and he goes through his fifteen-step hair process because this is what he does. He is unchangeable, and maybe that’s why all of his relationships are hard; he chooses other people that are unchangeable too, and then sets them up so that they throw themselves at him with the speed of a freight train and he throws back, and the collision is always fatal. He never could meet his father halfway, or Mark, for that matter.

 

Eduardo is, by the way, well aware that the blame for some of what happened with Mark lies at his door. The problem is that he’d rather be angry than guilty, and Mark is his receptacle for not just all of the things he hates about Mark, but all of the things he’s never liked about himself.

 

When Eduardo leaves the hotel, he’s not initially sure where he’s going, but his rental takes him across the city and at some point he just parks it in an empty lot and gets out to study the skyline. The Golden Gate Bridge looms closer than he’d thought, a massive man-made skeleton, its rusty bones razor-thin and forbidding against a grey sky.

 

Without any well-formed idea of what he means to do, Eduardo starts off toward the bridge. It is windy, and he has forgotten his jacket at the hotel, but he just tucks his hands into the pockets of his suit and grinds on. The Bridge is even larger close up, and Eduardo dimly remembers reading something a long time ago – 700 feet? 750 feet above the water? Whatever the exact number, the thing is a monstrosity, a colossal scar on a wild passage with strange currents.

 

Eduardo makes his way to the pedestrian sidewalk, on the side of the bridge facing the bay. There is a sign on the way in – _There is hope, make the call; The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic_ – that makes him smile for some reason, just a bitter half-twist of his mouth. He has heard these kinds of things in the news, that the city of San Francisco has hired security teams to patrol the pedestrian bridge, and that it is closed to foot traffic at night, all in the hope of preventing more suicides at the most popular suicide destination in the world.

 

Eduardo doesn’t think that most of it works. The bridge is an alluring figure, if only because taking too many pills or slitting your wrists seems like an exercise in passivity; you lived your life quietly, and now you’re going to go out with a whimper, too. Some people want to leave a bigger impression than that. Eduardo can imagine having the image of the bridge etched indelibly on your mind, that seeing it once, it becomes the place where you _must_ end it. It becomes the only appropriate place to let the world know that you are not handling things.

 

Eduardo grips the railing with both hands and looks down into the heady grey-blue waters of the Golden Gate, the channel between the San Francisco bay and the Pacific Ocean. When the sun comes out periodically and lights up the sky, the water turns blue, too. It is an eerie, unreadable thing to Eduardo when it’s grey, but when it’s blue, he feels okay with it again. It feels familiar.

 

Eduardo looks back down the walkway. Two cyclists pass him, ignoring him. A woman and her friend are power-walking, and they give Eduardo a curious look as they pass – _I’m wearing a pocket square_ , he thinks, crazily - but they don’t ask him if he’s doing all right. _I don’t look unwell,_ he thinks, raking his fingers back through his hair, resting his palms against his temples. _They don’t know me, and I look like someone who has his shit together._

 

Except he doesn’t have his shit together, he really doesn’t, and as he reaches for the railing again and leans over, far over, to look down into the water, Eduardo realizes with a rush how easy this is. Some decisions require a lot of time and care, a lot of caution and homework and weighing the alternatives. Some decisions are easy. Eduardo thinks that’s probably because they’re not really quote-unquote _decisions_ at all.

 

And he has done what he has to do, left nothing of consequence behind him so that his journey can go on from here without too much of a mess for everyone to clean up. There’s not a lot to go home to at this point, and he won’t waste his time. It’s almost startling that this never occurred to him before. Then he remembers his almost unconscious journey across the city and acquires a grim understanding that it did occur to him, but he was just slow to acknowledge it.

 

Eduardo doesn’t jump so much as he falls.

 

And the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold.


	2. Falling

Like every shareholder meeting, this one makes Mark want to eat glass or put a pencil in his ear or do _something_ to make Chris let him go home. As it is, his head of PR and self-appointed Vice President of Not Letting Mark Fuck Things Up has confiscated Mark’s laptop and given him a stern warning about checking his phone too often. Chris knows better than to take the phone away, too. Mark will make the meeting _intolerable_ if he decides that everyone else should join him in his boredom and misery. The phone is a compromise but Chris is still watching him like a hawk.

 

They are more than two hours in, and Mark knows that there will be a break soon, but the thought is making him more antsy than usual. He has lowered himself to the level of playing Extreme Hangman with Dustin, who is gleefully sitting at his desk instead of in this meeting and is only too happy to enable Mark in the wasting of time.

 

Someone from Accounting is saying something that Mark could definitely understand if he weren’t stubbornly deciding to interpret everything as mumbo jumbo. He always tells Chris that it’s pointless for him to be at these meetings because he doesn’t even understand this financial bullshit, but they both know it’s not true, and Mark has never been a convincing liar.

 

It is at this moment that there is an alert from Chris in the corner of Mark's game with Dustin, who has just hacked the head off of Mark’s hangman. Mark checks the alert because it comes at a convenient moment in his game, and also because it’s probably just a reprimand for not paying enough attention. Mark can actually parrot back a summary of what was said in the last ten minutes or so because his brain is scary like that, but Chris always just folds his arms and gives him a raised eyebrow when he does it and Mark realizes that they’ve known each other too long.

 

The message is not, in fact, a reprimand of any kind.

 

_From: Chris_

_To: Mark; Dustin_

_Check CNN._

 

Underneath, there is a link to a news story.

 

Chris is the guy who always reads the news, and he’ll forward things to Mark and Dustin that neither of them are particularly interested in. Dustin always acts like the news story is _outrageous_ or _super sweet, bro_ or whatever reaction he thinks Chris is anticipating. Mark never bothers to react at all.

 

_To: Magic; Maaaark_

_From: D-Man_

_OMG._

So when he gets that reaction text from Dustin maybe ten seconds later, Mark isn’t overly concerned. Dustin always immediately responds to e-mails, and he always reacts to Chris’ news stories like they matter, so the comment doesn’t strike Mark as particularly jarring or out of the ordinary.

 

Still, he’s bored, so he clicks over to the news story, anticipating something about melting ice caps or violence in Syria.

 

**_Facebook Co-Founder Jumps from Golden Gate Bridge_** fills the entire, tiny screen.

 

The headline doesn’t mean anything for a single, pure moment, because Chris is sitting just down the table and Dustin is playing Extreme Hangman and Eduardo – _Eduardo._

 

Clear as a bell, Mark remembers the night of the million members party, more as a sound bite than as an actual, pictorial memory: _And I’ll bet what you hated the most was that they identified me as a co-founder of Facebook, which I am._

 

 Feeling a twist in a place under his ribcage that he wasn’t sure had the capacity to surge and crumple like that, Mark scrolls down.

 

_Co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, 23, attempted suicide early this afternoon by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA. Investigators speculate that Saverin was in town for a Facebook shareholder’s meeting._

 

Mark stops reading after ‘ _attempted suicide’._ That means that Eduardo was unsuccessful. Because it’s Mark, he visits the Wikipedia page for the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

Suicide attempts there have a 98% mortality rate.

 

Mark looks up and seeks out Chris, but it isn’t until a moment later that he realizes that Chris is behind him, making apologies for their abrupt exit from the meeting, and pulling him out of his chair.

 

Mark lets him do it, following him into the hallway even as Dustin comes sprinting toward them from down the corridor, pale as a ghost.

 

“He’s at UCSF, they took him to UCSF – ”

 

Chris nods, and for some reason it hushes Dustin as they both turn to look at Mark. Mark stares back, feeling suddenly backed into a corner.

 

“What?” He demands.

 

“It’s _Wardo_ ,” Dustin says, like that’s supposed to mean something more than it does.

 

Mark shrugs. “I know. Are we going to the hospital or not?”

 

Chris and Dustin exchange glances, but they don’t say anything else on the way down to the lobby. Chris leaves instructions for his team – there is no way the press won’t be calling, asking for a comment – and tells them that he is no more than a phone call or an e-mail away. Dustin flags down a cab, and then there is a dense, quiet, stifling ride to the hospital. Mark is sandwiched between Chris and Dustin and he does not like the way they keep looking at him, like they are expecting some kind of reaction that he is not having.

 

To simply _avoid eye contact,_ Mark takes out his phone again. He searches ‘ _falls from a height_ ’ and ‘ _injury patterns after a fall_ ’. Might as well know what they’re in for, anyway.

 

What _Eduardo_ is in for. Mark isn’t making any promises, at this point.

 

“The most common injuries are fractures of the thoracic and lumbar spine – eighty-three per cent – with a preference for the thoracolumbar junction,” Mark reads out.

 

“Mark, put it away,” Chris says, with forced patience, and it isn’t until Mark looks up, irritated, that he sees that Dustin is white as a sheet, watching him with huge, panicked eyes.

 

Sometimes Mark doesn’t make the association in his mind that Chris and Dustin were Eduardo’s friends, too. It has been so long since the four of them were in a room together, studying or playing video games or talking about Facebook.

 

“Well, he didn’t die, so he’s already in the two per cent survivor range,” Mark says. “Maybe he’ll get lucky again.”

 

Neither Chris nor Dustin has anything to say to that, so they ride out the rest of the cab ride in silence. Even Mark can tell that his last couple of statements were – _insensitive_ , at a best, but Chris and Dustin don’t seem inclined to give him the usual amount of hell for it.

 

Chris will tell him later, much later down the line, that Mark was terrified during the cab ride. Mark will disagree with him, of course, but Chris will only give him a knowing look and go back to work, which is one of the major themes of their dynamic as friends.

 

When they reach the hospital there is a small tangle of media gathered outside, and Chris mutters, “Oh, _shit_ ,” and directs the cab driver around to the side of the building. The fact that they have not rolled up in a black Escalade with a security detail seems to protect their identities – it’s Mark’s, mostly, that Chris is worried about; he and Dustin don’t really register on most people’s radars, unless they’re in the business – and they get out of the cab with no fanfare. Chris pays the driver and Dustin tips him extra, as usual, and then they go into the hospital.

 

“Do you think it would be bad press to be seen visiting him?” Mark asks, as they follow the signs on the wall to the main reception area.

 

“I think it would be bad press to seem like we’re visiting him for a photo-op,” Chris offers.

 

“And you don’t know if he’ll even see me,” Mark says flatly.

 

“Well.” Chris glances at a sign on the wall and then away, and evasiveness – with Mark, at least – is unusual for him. “If we looked like we came here in a rush and then Eduardo didn’t want to see us... yes, I think that would be an unfortunate news story.”

 

And then Mark realizes that Chris is being evasive to spare his _feelings_ , and it’s almost too much. “What do you think I’m going to do if he won’t see me?” Mark demands. “I’m an adult, Chris. I’m not going to make a scene.”

 

“I know,” Chris says, and he gives Mark an odd, pitying look that Mark can’t even begin to decipher.

 

“Don’t say anything awful to him,” Dustin says suddenly, so suddenly that both Chris and Mark look at him in surprise. Dustin hurries to explain himself. “He’s – if he tried to jump off a bridge, he’s not in a good place, is what I’m saying.”

 

Mark realizes that it’s his own fault that the two of them have this impression of him, but it doesn’t stop him from being indignant and puzzled. “What do you think I’m going to say?”

 

“Just – try to forget that the last place you saw him was across a deposition table,” Chris suggests quietly. “Don’t get into that with him, Mark, there will be a time and place for that later.”

 

Mark shrugs – _okay?_ – because they can’t seriously be expecting him to start an angry shouting match with Eduardo in a _hospital_ , it’s ridiculous.

 

And yet as Chris approaches the receptionist and she tells them that Eduardo is in emergency surgery and they must wait, Mark realizes that maybe he _is_ angry. But it’s not just about the lawsuit and everything that preceded that, the freezing of the account and _you’ve got to come out to California_.

 

He’s angry that they are _here_ , visiting Eduardo in a painfully-lit, too-clean medical facility; that the first time they speak to one another in a long, long time will be in an impersonal single-bed hospital room because Eduardo _threw himself off a bridge._

 

Mark understands what it’s like to be upset and confused, but he has not come close to plumbing the depths of the kind of depression that would drive someone to damage themselves like that. He can’t quite believe that Eduardo has, either. He knows that Eduardo has always been the emotional one, too in touch with his feelings for his own good, but the scope and breadth of a _suicide attempt_ is unfathomable to Mark. He is full of rage that Eduardo would be so _selfish_ , so _cowardly_. He wants to ream Eduardo for making them concerned and afraid, for putting that look on Dustin’s face, for coming to San Francisco so that the proximity would be such that Mark would have no excuse _not_ to react. So that Mark would _have_ to acknowledge it, and him.

 

_There are less permanent ways to get my attention,_ he thinks, with a bitter twist of his mouth. And then, a quiet part of his mind adds, _If that’s what this is about._

 

He almost hopes that it is.

 

Not because Mark has some kind of sick, self-centered compulsion to be the reason for someone’s death wish; it’s simply that there is a mostly unacknowledged place, deep down and half-buried, that is _terrified_ that Eduardo is at a point where he can’t be fixed. Or that what is wrong with him is out of Mark’s depth and reach.

 

He tries not to think about it.

 

The time until they can see Eduardo passes almost interminably slowly. Dustin, antsy, finally leaves to get them sandwiches. Chris spends a lot of time on the phone with his team back at Facebook, and Mark has a hunch that he has instructed the office _not_ to message Mark unless it is life-or-death, because Mark’s phone is totally silent. When Dustin returns with the sandwiches, Mark rips his methodically into tiny pieces that he then proceeds not to eat. Chris throws a quizzical glance his way but says nothing.

 

It is evening by the time a nurse approaches them in the waiting room.

 

“You’re here about Mr. Saverin?”

 

Chris rises immediately. “Yes. We’re his – ”

 

“Step-brothers,” Mark cuts in, standing too. He gestures. “All three of us.”

 

Chris has the sense not to raise an eyebrow or otherwise give away that Mark is lying. Dustin is less subtle, but the nurse, after sweeping them all with a wary glance, seems inclined to cut them a break.

 

“Well, it was good of you to come. Eduardo’s medical records say that his family is based in Miami so you must have gotten on a plane as soon as you heard the news.”

 

Dustin makes a sort of noise behind Mark and Chris, an apparent reaction to the nurse knowing exactly how full of shit they are but letting them get away with it.

 

The nurse raises an eyebrow minutely at Dustin, but all she says is, “Come with me.”

 

The route to, and then past, the ICU is ridiculously unmemorable, Mark thinks; all of the hallways have identical off-white paint, the same kinds of functional, if not remarkable, pieces of art on the walls. The nurse takes them past the area where intensive care patients lie in long rows, separated by pale green curtains. Eduardo has a room of his own, the nurse explains; his insurance covers it, and besides, he is on twenty-four hour suicide watch and needs specialized monitoring.

 

Mark wonders, in a sort of off-handed way, how many patients the hospital sees per year who have attempted suicide via Golden Gate. It can’t be very many. And yet Eduardo’s must be a case they have seen before, in this city that draws people to punch their own tickets in spectacular, theatrical fashion on a regular basis. Maybe his face blends in with a hundred other faces for the hospital staff; maybe they know him, in a clinical, imprecise way, because they’ve known the hundred others who have come before, with the same injuries and the same hang-ups that put them here to begin with.

 

For some reason, it makes Mark shudder.

 

The nurse stops them outside of Eduardo’s room. She informs them, in a controlled, cautious tone, that Eduardo has been through a lot, that he needs rest, that they are not to upset him. Chris is the one with the serious expression who nods along, so she speaks mostly to him. She also warns them that Eduardo is a little loopy, still, from the drugs they gave him for his surgery, and that he will most likely be asleep.

 

Mark is unsurprised. Eduardo gets woozy from a regular-strength Tylenol.

 

It’s thoughts like these that, after a beat, stop Mark in his tracks. As though he still _knows_ Eduardo, after all this time. It isn’t even true, though, and he knows it, when he gives himself a chance to think about it. He knows the person that Eduardo _was_ , the Eduardo that existed before Facebook and during the lawsuit. This Eduardo, today’s Eduardo, is like a stranger that Mark has read a lot about. He knows _about_ Eduardo, but he no longer knows Eduardo – not really.

 

The nurse is only supposed to allow them in to visit him one at a time, but Dustin is sort of stuck to Chris, not really holding onto him in any particular way so much as melted into his side, and Mark refuses to be left behind, so Chris takes the nurse aside and has a few quiet words with her. Ultimately, she lets them all in at once, but she makes them promise not to create undue noise and to _let Eduardo rest._

 

Mark nods along impatiently, and at last they are allowed into the room. It is just what Mark expected, the same size and shape and colour of hospital rooms everywhere. The window looks out onto a dark courtyard, which is probably sun-filled during the day and seems kind of incongruous. On the wall, there is a picture of upward-looking Jesus with his hands clasped and Mark thinks, disconnectedly, _I don’t know how much good that’s going to do an agnostic Jew._

 

Mark’s gaze falls next upon the army of machines, arrayed around the bed.

 

And then there is Eduardo.

 

It is not that he is unrecognizable because his face is in any way damaged. In truth, aside from a little puffiness and an almost eerie pallor, Eduardo looks like himself. But there is something about him that is so _not_ the Eduardo that Mark remembers that for a moment it’s almost like looking upon a stranger, until Eduardo’s dark eyes pull into focus – it takes him a moment; Mark remembers, _regular-strength Tylenol_ – and there is recognition there.

 

Eduardo’s face looks like one of the only parts of him that is untouched. There is vivid bruising that starts at his neck and disappears under his hospital gown. One arm is bandaged, and the odd shapes under the blue hospital blanket tell the story that Eduardo might not walk again, in the near future or ever. The machines in the room are monitoring him, beeping quietly every so often. Mark recognizes a startling degree of stark relief when he realizes that Eduardo doesn’t need the help of the machines to breathe. He is doing that on his own.

 

And then it is like the sky opens up, and Mark doesn’t know what to do.

 

“Mark.”

 

This is the first thing that Eduardo says, just that, one cracked syllable in a ravaged voice: _Mark._ It sounds like it is difficult to push the word out, which Mark thinks is unsurprising from a medical standpoint since Eduardo just had some key vertebrae take heavy casualties only to find themselves ruthlessly snapped back into place by a medical team.

 

From a personal standpoint, though, it’s really, really hard to listen to. Mark remembers things like, _Give each girl a base rating of 1400_ and, _We all know marlins don’t actually weigh three thousand pounds though, right._ That Eduardo had sounded nothing like this Eduardo, this shattered version that has been haphazardly repaired by a group of people who mean well but have to hope for the best like anyone else. And Mark has it stubbornly in his mind, even though it doesn’t make any sense, that the doctors here didn’t have a base model to build from; they didn’t know Eduardo in his slick, trim black suits, his carefully coiffed hair, the way he looked at his best friends and _trusted_. So they were re-building blind, with no blueprint, and Mark doesn’t trust the job they’ve done, not one bit.

 

The crux of all of this is that Eduardo doesn’t just look like a stranger; he sounds like one, too. So when Mark approaches the bed, almost cautiously, he isn’t thinking about the lawyers and the paperwork and point zero three per cent. He is wondering what exactly is broken and how long it will take to heal and whether Eduardo will go back to being the man who stands across the room from Mark in mutual enmity whenever they attend the same event, where they can each feel the other studiously _not_ watching them – or whether he is permanently changed. Mark is definitely not keen on the Eduardo who hated him, flawlessly, from thousands of miles away, but he is certain that he is no more keen on a new version of Eduardo, one who might be too tired to keep doing this (although Mark thinks that they don’t have a wide variety of choices).

 

Mark comes to a halt, awkwardly, two or three paces from the bed. Eduardo’s gaze hovers, hazy and razor-thin, on Mark for a moment, and then, like he has been looking at the light and it hurts his eyes _not_ to avert them, Eduardo looks at Chris and Dustin instead.

 

Mark feels like he has been caught in the vice-grip of a police headlight and abruptly dropped. He is unsure what to do with himself as Dustin moves past him and Chris goes around to the other side of the bed. He decides to melt back against the wall, just watching, because Eduardo doesn’t seem to know what to do with his presence and Mark thinks that this might be the one time when he can cut Eduardo a break; doesn’t need to push his envelope with him.

 

“Hey, Eduardo.” Chris has never been as fond of the diminutive _Wardo_ as the rest of them. Mark’s not sure why that is, but he sometimes has the bizarre impression that Chris thinks that _Wardo_ is simply Mark’s territory, and he will not infringe upon it. It is like Chris has decided to walk all the way around Mark’s lawn every day, even though Mark has never so much as posted a _KEEP OFF THE GRASS_ sign. Mark thinks it’s ridiculous, since Dustin uses _Wardo_ too, and in any case, it had seemed to Mark like the most obvious way to shorten the ridiculously long _Eduardo_ until he had heard Eduardo’s sister called him _Edi_.

 

But that was a long time ago and far away, and now Mark is here, listening to Chris talk to Eduardo like he is some fragile thing that might break at any moment; like he hasn’t broken already. Chris asks Eduardo how he’s feeling, whether there’s anything they can do to help. Eduardo murmurs answers that Mark doesn’t quite listen to, because he knows that they are empty. For some reason, he can just tell. Eduardo hasn’t let his guard down around any of them for years, although Mark knows full well that he and Dustin periodically exchange e-mails, and that Eduardo met up with Chris for lunch when they were both in New York last March.

 

And then Chris says, “Eduardo, you know that you can always call me, right?”

 

And Mark – well, his first thought is, _we’re not supposed to upset him, and I think bringing up his suicide attempt is probably upsetting_ , while his second thought follows up with, _It’s Chris’ job to think of these things, what is wrong with me._

 

Eduardo’s expression is slow to change because of the drugs, but ultimately he just looks wary. “Call you?”

 

“Yeah. If you need anything, or if you want to talk. I’m just a phone call away.” Chris gestures. “Dustin, too.”

 

Dustin nods, and they both watch him with varying degrees of anxiety and concern. He is the ticking time bomb; they operate on his schedule.

 

“Well, that’s nice. I...” Eduardo looks down, as though something about the blanket catches his eyes, and tugs fitfully at the fabric. “I didn’t think...” His eyes don’t quite find Mark, standing watchfully in his corner, but they don’t have to. Everyone knows what he means. _I didn’t think you were still my friends, not really._ Chris and Dustin chose their loyalties, and they both chose Facebook – and Mark.

 

“Okay,” Chris says, slowly and patiently. “I’m sorry for everything that happened, Eduardo. I really am. But I need you to listen to me because this is really important. Even if for some reason you think that I never want to see you again – even if, in the future, one of us does something so awful that the other person just wants to bludgeon him to death – you can call me if you need a friend. If you’re thinking about doing something like this, I will fly to you, wherever you are, and we’ll talk it out. That’s a promise. Got that?”

 

“Me, too,” Dustin says a little hoarsely, and it is less verbose but no less sincere. They really do care about Eduardo, Mark realizes; not in a superficial way but on a level that makes Mark wonder with a tinge of guilt how they dealt with the depositions and everything else.

 

For some reason – and while he knows Eduardo, there are still some things that Mark will never understand – Chris’ statement makes Eduardo’s eyes fill with tears. Some of it is undoubtedly the drugs, but Mark isn’t sure that Eduardo wouldn’t get teary-eyed over that anyway. Eduardo cries at the end of _Rebel Without a Cause_ and he can’t even get through the _Green Mile_.

 

“It wasn’t – I didn’t mean to – “ Eduardo grips the blanket tightly with the hand that is not bandaged, looking ashamed and overwhelmed and bewildered all at the same time. Dustin looks like he’s considering lunging forward and devouring Eduardo into a hug, except that he’s not sure how to do it without causing Eduardo pain, since everything is bruised and fragile and cracked like an old china plate.

 

“It’s okay,” Chris says, and he’s good at these things; there’s a reason they always called him _the empath_ around the Facebook offices. He reaches for Eduardo’s good wrist and gives it a light, reassuring squeeze. “Eduardo, you don’t have to explain anything to us today.”

 

Eduardo is looking steadfastly down at the blankets, the tears in his eyes stalled, just swimming on the edge. “It wasn’t a suicide attempt. I wasn’t thinking like that, I didn’t mean for it to be _like that_.”

 

The rest of them are silent. There is really not a lot they can say in response; it’s a flat denial to an absolute truth, like someone who is faced with the ocean and denies the existence of water. How could it _not_ have been a suicide attempt? Nobody accidentally falls off a bridge, Mark thinks, absolutely certain. Eduardo didn’t lean over to look at something and lose his balance. If that were possible, idiots would be falling off the Golden Gate every ten seconds.

 

“It’s okay,” Chris says again, gently. “We’re not judging you. We’re not mad.”

 

“Speak for yourself.” This is the first time Mark’s really said anything since he came into the room, so they all look at him. He only has eyes for Eduardo. “You weren’t even thinking. And now you’re lying about it.”

 

Something in Eduardo’s face shifts, and Mark can tell that they are, however briefly, returning to familiar territory. This is good; they know how to hate each other. “Of course I was thinking, Mark. I _never_ stop thinking, that’s the only way you can come to a conclusion like that – ”

 

“So it _was_ a suicide attempt,” Mark says flatly.

 

“ _No._ ” Eduardo’s unbandaged hand is clenched tightly around a handful of his blanket. “I was just – it was a bad day – a bad week – Jesus, it hasn’t been a good _year_ and I felt – reckless. You know, I just wanted to _do_ something. It’s been a long time since I wanted to do something.”

 

Eduardo knows he is bad at explaining this. They will never understand. Even Chris and Dustin, with their sympathetic, attentive faces, will never know the precise symphony of sounds that joined together and forced Eduardo off the edge. If there even _is_ an edge to step off, since this just feels like more of the same.

 

And Eduardo is quite sure that he is not, in fact, lying. There was never a moment when he planned his jump, or when he came to the conclusion that it was a Thing That Should Be Done. He’s spent the last couple of weeks hardly motivated to get out of bed; he can hardly believe that there was a moment of insane determination when he suddenly thought that it would be a good idea to make the most significant of all decisions.

 

Then again, everything immediately before the fall is hazy. Eduardo can’t be sure of anything, of course. It could be that he thought, very clearly, _This is it. I’m going to jump._ Somehow, though, he doesn’t think so. One thing that he knows in his bones is that he _does not want to die_. He does not want _the_ way out.

 

It occurs to him that he just wants _a_ way out.

 

“Well, you did something,” Mark is saying, his own fingers curled in towards his palms. “So good for you.”

 

Eduardo shuts his eyes. He has to, because that look on Mark’s face makes him so tired. Mark can go round after round after round. Eduardo just wants to drift away. “I don’t want to fight about this with you.”

 

“Then you shouldn’t have done it,” Mark snaps.

 

Eduardo doesn’t open his eyes, not even for Mark, not even for that tone of voice that reminds him of _you’re going to be mad at me because you made a bad business deal with your own company_. “I’m not disagreeing with you.”

 

“There is officially nothing bad enough that merits diving off a bridge. It’s the _Golden Gate_ , it’s practically a cliché. You won the lawsuit, you don’t even have anything to be upset about – ”

 

“My dad died.”

 

Mark shuts up right then, because he needs to digest that and Dustin and Chris are both staring at him like he has kicked over a hornet’s nest.

 

“Your dad died,” Mark echoes, after a moment. “When?”

 

Dustin makes a choked-off, disbelieving sound, like Mark needs to _shut the hell up right_ now, but Eduardo just gives a vague shake of his head, like there is a faint, painful sound in his ear. “Almost two weeks ago. But it doesn’t – I mean, I didn’t bring it up to throw it in your face like that, I’m sorry. It’s just been – I mean, I think about it.”

 

Mark is surprised that this has not come up on his radar. He wants to blame someone, but it’s not like he has ever (or legally has the right to) put his employees on keeping-tabs-on-Eduardo duty. Sometimes Mark checks up on him, almost out of spite ( _take that, Eduardo, I can read your e-mails if I_ want _to_ ), but this is not frequent. It is disconcerting – Eduardo’s father has quietly died, and there was really no way for Mark to get a heads up beyond Eduardo telling him.

 

Interestingly, or perhaps alarmingly, this is also the first time ever that Mark has heard Eduardo refer to his _dad_ , rather than the rather more distant _my father_.

 

“I’m really sorry to hear that, Wardo,” Dustin says quietly, and Chris nods in agreement, although his gaze is firmly fixed on Mark and he is wearing his _for the love of God, Mark, please_ face.

 

It turns out that he doesn’t need to bother, because at some point Eduardo’s closing-his-eyes-to-block-out-Mark has become closing-his-eyes-to-sleep, and he is out like a light. In spite of himself, Mark remembers the way Eduardo used to sleep in college, sprawled on Mark’s bed with his cheek pressed against the pages of an economics textbook. That used to happen rather more than Mark was comfortable with, and the discomfort was not because Eduardo’s presence bothered him, but because he knew exactly why Eduardo studied himself into a coma.

 

Mark doesn’t think he will be as quick to make a saint out of Eduardo’s _father_.

 

Eduardo sleeps more heavily now than he ever did at Harvard, and they are able to leave, Dustin and Chris murmuring to each other, without him so much as stirring. Mark is mostly silent on the way out of the hospital, and he doesn’t so much as turn his usual scowl when an errant press photographer catches them leaving and snaps a shot.

 

That night, it is Mark, not Eduardo, who dreams of falling.


	3. Impact

Mark gets up for work the next morning feeling groggy. He didn’t sleep well, but then again, most of his best work is done under a certain degree of sleeplessness so he’s not really worried about it impacting his productivity. When he checks his phone, he has a missed call from Dustin and a follow-up text message:

 

_To: Magic; Maaark_

_From: D-Man_

_We shud get wardo sumthing! I like cookies when i’m sick. Plz advise!_

 

Mark shakes his head. Dustin is a Harvard-educated programmer with a borderline-genius IQ and he always insists on typing like a kindergartener.

 

_To: D-Man_

_From: Mark_

_Everything you write makes my eyes hurt._

 

He goes to work without acknowledging the point of Dustin’s text message, because he doesn’t want to focus on Eduardo right now. The peripheral bits and pieces of his consciousness are spending enough time doing it and Mark needs his point of focus to be elsewhere because –

 

He just does.

 

He needs to get some work done.

 

It annoys Mark that Eduardo has hijacked the corners of his attention. Intellectually he knows that Eduardo didn’t do what he did with the specific purpose of driving Mark crazy, but the spiteful part of him is irritated with Eduardo anyway and wants to call him up to give him a piece of Mark’s mind.

 

He doesn’t, of course, because that would be ridiculous. Eduardo doesn’t need to know he’s gotten a reaction.

 

Mark has only been in the office for twenty minutes – Chris and Dustin aren’t here yet, and there are only one or two sleepy-eyed interns wandering around who show up early because they are under the mostly mistaken impression that it’s going to earn them brownie points with Mark, who neither notices nor cares – when his phone rings. Normally his assistant would get it, but she’s not due for another half an hour and most people don’t have the direct line to Mark’s office so he figures it’s probably important enough for him to bother picking it up.

 

The voice on the other end is unfamiliar. It is a woman with perhaps slightly more than a trace of an accent, and it occurs to Mark who she must be a bare nanosecond before she announces her name.

 

“Am I speaking to Mark Zuckerberg? This is Natalia Saverin.”

 

“Yes.” Mark isn’t sure whether he’s agreeing to being Mark Zuckerberg or whether he’s affirming that indeed, she is Natalia Saverin –  she must be, because who else would sound just a little bit like Brazil and be able to cajole his personal office number out of Eduardo?

 

“I’m Eduardo’s sister,” she says, unnecessarily, and Mark nods even though she can’t see him. She takes his silence as an invitation to continue. “I am calling to let you know that I have filled the nurse in on your little _ruse_ and that you will _not_ be permitted to see him again.”

 

Well, whatever Mark was expecting, it wasn’t exactly that. It really isn’t that surprising, he supposes, since he’s gathered from Eduardo’s phone conversations and e-mails over the years that Natalia was never Mark’s biggest fan, and the situation has probably not improved overmuch since the whole dilution-of-the-shares thing. Still, he has to admit he’s surprised that Natalia’s probably been visiting Eduardo for all of about half an hour (he checks his watch; hospital visiting hours have barely begun) and she’s already wrangled out of him that Mark has been in to visit.

 

Or she’s spoken to the nurse, which – Mark’s not sure why it makes him feel better to think that Eduardo might not have ratted him out, but it does.

 

“It wasn’t meant to be a _ruse_ , I’m not James Bond,” Mark replies, with that beautiful edge of sarcasm that he has perfected over the years. “I just knew they wouldn’t let us in unless we were family and that wasn’t an option.”

 

Mark can practically _hear_ Natalia’s face darkening over the phone line. The anger that comes out of Eduardo in flashes and spurts when he’s been pushed to his limit is much closer to the surface in Natalia. Unlike the way he feels about her brother, though, Mark possesses the tiniest amount of fear of her. She is ruthless, and she is better than Eduardo at not letting the people she loves manipulate her.

 

Mark will never tell anyone this, but she is the reason why he traveled with just a little bit of extra security during the depositions.

 

“You’re not family,” she spits out. “I’m his family. My mother is his family. You are the asshole who ruined his life so you can _stay away._ ”

 

“I’m sorry that I pushed him off a bridge; we both just happened to be in San Francisco and I thought it would be fun to test if he can swim,” Mark snaps, since it sounds suspiciously like she’s implying some kind of fault at Mark’s door, and Mark _begs to fucking differ_. Even if Eduardo is upset because of him, that doesn’t make it Mark’s _fault_ that he chose to react this way.

 

“Yes, sit in your tower and make disrespectful comments, that’s tremendously mature,” Natalia snaps back, and Mark thinks, _this is what it would be like to fight with Eduardo if he weren’t so afraid of hurting people, if it didn’t take so much to back him into a corner_.

 

“It turns out that he _can_ swim, but he’s not that good with long-distance falls,” Mark replies acidly, and he knows it’s awful but Natalia has a way of making him want to hit things, and Mark usually doesn’t get like that. He’s not good at being furious; cold and biting is more in his wheelhouse.

 

“You’re repellent,” Natalia informs him, “and I hope for your sake that you don’t come near this hospital because I will make you regret it.” She lowers her voice; for some reason, it makes Mark realize that he is gripping the phone so hard that his knuckles hurt, and he relaxes his grip. “I can’t stop my brother from taking your phone calls or answering your pathetic e-mails once he gets out of the hospital,” she grinds out, “but for now his technology is in my hands and _I_ am the gatekeeper of this whole fucking castle. Do you understand me? So don’t even try it.”

 

“What happened with Facebook was complex, it wasn’t necessarily _about_ Eduardo – ” Mark begins, annoyed, knowing as he does that he’s explaining this to the wrong Saverin, but she cuts him off anyway.

 

“Oh, _please._ ”

 

And then there is a vicious-sounding click and a dial tone.

 

Mark sits back in his office chair and watches the phone for a moment as though it has the capacity to come to life and take a snap at him. Mark’s not sure what his intentions have ever been toward Eduardo, and he certainly had not come to any kind of decision about visiting Eduardo in the hospital on any kind of semi-regular basis, but he was definitely planning on going back again at some point soon. Eduardo has reopened his life to Mark on some level, or that’s what Mark’s impression of this situation is anyway, and he plans to make the best of it: He has bones to pick and scores to settle with his former best friend, or however you refer to what he and Eduardo are to each other now.

 

_And apologies to make,_ Chris and probably Dustin would add to the list of things that Mark and Eduardo have left unresolved, but Mark’s not making any promises there.

 

After all, he’d _told_ Eduardo to come out to California.

 

Mark decides after a moment that not visiting Eduardo again is a non-option. And he dislikes Natalia enough that a big part of him wants to do it just to spite her, especially because now getting in will require some advance planning since she’s probably got every hospital staffer and his or her neighbour on the lookout for him.

 

Which, with anyone else, would sound like an exaggeration. But Mark knows Natalia. They’ve never met face-to-face, but she is like looking at Eduardo through a distorted mirror, and if Mark can recognize any motive of hers at all, it’s that protecting her brother is paramount. She has always been that way; Mark remembers way back when he and Eduardo first met, and he’d hacked into Eduardo’s e-mail for no other reasons than a) because back then he had liked to prove that he _could_ , and b) he had been keen to know more about his friends than they knew about him. It had seemed like a necessary precaution. All of Eduardo’s e-mails from his sister – and there had been a lot, maybe two or three a day – had been full of _mil beijinhos_ (thousand kisses) and _eu te amo,_ _maninho_ (love you, little brother) and she’d always been cajoling him to eat more, sleep more, pay less attention to their father, be _safe_ , don’t trust so easy.

 

She had said all of these things in Portuguese, of course, with a smattering of pseudo-anglicisms. Mark had dutifully run them all through a translator (one with his own upgrades, since the ones on the Net have always kind of sucked). Then, as now, he was struck by the closeness Eduardo develops with anyone who will have him. Mark’s own sisters are not unlike Natalia in their desire to make sure that Mark isn’t taken advantage of, but unlike Mark, Eduardo seems to genuinely bask in the affection. He had responded to each and every e-mail, firing off not a small number of his own if a day passed when Natalia didn't start a conversation.

 

Mark doesn’t fully grasp this, but he understands that on some level, he and Natalia were once on the same side (however much she’s never liked him) and now they are not (from her perspective). She will always represent the side of Eduardo that does not trust Mark and probably won’t be able to, not completely, ever again, no matter if Mark deigns to quote-unquote ‘make amends’ or not.

 

Mark thinks that maybe this is okay. Eduardo has always trusted way too easily. If he wants to avoid getting hurt again, he will need to figure out how to back away from that tendency, at least until he finds someone he can put his faith in who won’t throw it back in his face.

 

Mark has no illusions about being that person. It takes awhile to accumulate someone’s trust when they’ve only just met you, but only seconds to wipe it all out. Now that Eduardo has precedent for what happens when he trusts Mark, well... he would be stupid not to learn that lesson, Mark thinks. And Eduardo has never been stupid. Naive, yes; emotional, definitely; but not stupid.

 

Mark has realized in the few years since he and Eduardo have been close that there are more things about Eduardo that he respects than he remembers noticing before. Maybe he just wasn’t paying attention at Harvard. More likely, he was bad for taking things for granted for most of his life, and Eduardo made it easy.

 

Mark leans back in the wheelie chair in his office and spins a one-eighty to see if anyone of note has arrived yet. For some reason, he feels a curious urge to bring up this phone call in conversation – with Chris or Dustin, namely – so that someone can feel indignant with him. Mark decides he’d rather it be Dustin, since Dustin will at least gamely scheme with him a way to get back into the hospital. Chris will just give him an infuriating, knowing look the second that Mark says Eduardo’s name, and then Mark will know no peace from the well-intentioned but sincerely _irritating_ attempts to make him behave toward Eduardo like a normal person.

 

It’s not like Mark is stalking him, okay? Eduardo never told him that he couldn’t be there, yesterday. And Mark can’t wrestle free from the feeling that maybe Eduardo’s leap of faith had some kind of connection, however tenuous, with the dilution of the shares and subsequent lawsuit. Eduardo’s had a rough couple of years, anyone can see that. Mark thinks again about how Eduardo’s father died and he didn’t even notice. Does Eduardo have friends in Singapore who sent him flowers and messages of condolence when it happened? Did he have a Dustin there to show up at his apartment and sit on the floor and eat cupcakes with him? Did he have anyone to remind him that his father was a _douchebag_ , seriously, and that Eduardo’s well rid of him?

 

Mark's not sure how to feel about any of that.

 

But he does think that if their unresolved... whatever it is, has become one of the things weighing Eduardo down, contributing to the straw-breaking-the-camel’s-back effect, then maybe they should just hash it out. Give Eduardo one less thing to brood about. After all, they never got properly angry with each other, did they? They had to be so goddamn _polite_ during the lawsuit that maybe it would be productive for them to rage at one another and burn up all of that leftover fuel.

 

And Mark’s not all ego, either, not like he used to be. If it comes down to it and he’s really pushed, he’s pretty sure he can tell Eduardo that he’s not angry with him anymore. Of course it’s not that simple, and it will probably never be one hundred per cent true, but Mark’s grown up a little. He knows how to say things sometimes because you have to, not necessarily because you want to.

 

Mind you, he doesn’t know if he can _apologize_ to Eduardo. That is a whole other, separate entity.

 

When Dustin arrives a few minutes later, rescuing Mark from the unfortunate landslide of thoughts that he really doesn’t need this early in the morning, he sets a coffee down in front of Mark and flops down in the chair across the desk.

 

“So,” he says, crossing an ankle over one knee.

 

Mark doesn’t say anything; he merely looks at Dustin, waiting for something productive to come out of his mouth. (With Dustin, sometimes the wait is long.)

 

“Did you dream all night about Wardo? Don’t lie, Mark-tastic, I’ll know if you’re lying.”

 

The sad part is, Dustin might actually know if Mark is lying. He has gotten disconcertingly good at reading Mark’s expressions and tones of voice in the past couple of years. They both eat, sleep, and breathe Facebook, after all. Spending that much time together gets unhealthy.

 

“I did not,” Mark replies, and it’s not a lie, not officially. He did dream about falling but there’s a potential for that to be unrelated.

 

“Oh.” Dustin seems disappointed. “Well, are we going to visit him today or what? I tried baking cookies and they turned out super terrible so I ended up just going to buy some and putting them in a homemade tin. I then hid the tin in a location only accessible via treasure map, because the interns are _vultures_.”

 

“Don’t keep me waiting on tenterhooks for the location of the treasure map,” Mark says, delightfully flat. He’s not even going to get into when Dustin may have had time to attempt baking cookies.

 

“I was going to tattoo it on my belly,” Dustin says gravely, “and by tattoo, I mean draw it in pen, but in the end I remembered that Facebook has a policy about indiscriminately exposing yourself in the office” (Dustin is the reason why this policy exists) “so I wrote it on a post-it and put it in my sock. Take that, interns.”

 

Dustin doesn’t actually care about the policy. Mark knows this because Dustin has never cared about the policy before. More importantly, Dustin has developed a new hang-up in the form of his kind-of nerd belly, which has been a constant source of anxiety for him recently, so he's not as keen on being semi-naked in the office as he might have once been. Mark had been telling himself that he didn’t know why this was – Dustin is not the type of guy to care about these things, he’s not the over-sensitive _body issues_ type – but then after awhile even Mark can read the signs Dustin is sending to his best friend and Mark thinks, _oh._

 

Because Chris is good-looking and patient and mild-mannered and all of the things Dustin is not - or all the things Dustin _thinks_ he's not, anyway; Mark's not going to do an analysis on how accurate any of this is, it's really way below his pay-grade professionally and way _above_ his pay-grade emotionally - although Mark can honestly say he’d rather hang out with Dustin. It’s just _easier_ and they can talk code over beers and play video games all night and Dustin doesn’t make him shower or put on suits sometimes or call his mother.

 

Still, that’s Dustin’s thing to deal with, this unrequited – or requited, maybe, Mark can’t read Chris as well as he can read Dustin – love thing he’s got going on. Mark has enough hang-ups of his own, thanks, and one of them is in a hospital room right now with a woman who is probably trying to figure out if she can long-distance telekinetically murder Mark with her mind.

 

“Well, we can’t visit Wardo,” Mark says, because thinking about Natalia reminds him. “His sister just called and told me in no uncertain times that I’ll stay away or she’ll kill me and wear my skin. You know, in so many words.”

 

“Brazilians are _crazy_ ,” Dustin says, in awe.

 

“Yes,” Mark agrees, even though mathematically speaking it’s unlikely that all one hundred and ninety-six million of them are certifiable. Mark knows two, though, and they are both their own special brands of unhinged – who smashes a laptop, seriously – so based on that admittedly limited sample, he can agree with Dustin’s assessment.

 

“I bet his sister’s a super-fox, though,” Dustin offers. “It’d be like Kill Bill, she’d just hot-girl massacre you. That’s one of the coolest deaths I can think of.”

 

“That’s incredibly helpful,” Mark says, because it’s not, but Dustin merrily ignores him.

 

“How are we gonna sneak in there?” Dustin considers this with a finger tapping on his chin. “I could use my 007 skills.”

 

“Dustin, you don’t have 007 skills.”

 

Dustin scoffs. “When you’ve played as much Goldeneye as I have, Mark, you pick up the tricks of the trade.”

 

“No, you don’t.”

 

“Stop crushing my dreams, you dream-crusher,” Dustin replies, unfazed. “I think we should just go in there and tell them it was all a misunderstanding.”

 

Mark raises an eyebrow. “Which part?”

 

“I don’t know.” Dustin shrugs. “Take your pick.”

 

The two of them lapse into silence, and when Chris joins them a moment later, he looks amused.

 

“Can I interrupt this productive meeting of the brain trust?”

 

“You’re part of the brain trust,” Dustin points out amiably. “You may wear fancy shirts and pay more than twelve dollars for a haircut but on the inside you’re still a dork.”

 

“You’re such a sweet-talker,” Chris replies, tucking his hands into his pockets as he joins the two of them at Mark’s desk, forming the last point on their triangle. “Someone posted that picture of us visiting Eduardo yesterday on Gawker. It’s not a huge deal but the article that accompanied it wasn’t very flattering.”

 

Mark and Dustin exchange glances. “Wardo’s sister saw it,” Mark says. “She called me this morning.”

 

“Oh?” Chris considers this. “I’m going to guess that she wasn’t incredibly friendly.”

 

“No,” Mark agrees.

 

“We’re trying to figure out a way to sneak in and visit Wardo anyway,” Dustin puts in helpfully.

 

“Well, here’s a thought.” Chris takes one hand out of his pockets, palm up. “Why don’t we let Eduardo get better, and once he’s out and he’s dealt with all of his – issues, then he can choose whether to see us or not.”

 

“No,” Mark says at once.

 

Chris sighs. “Mark, we’re not going to get into it with his family. They already lost Eduardo’s dad recently, I’m sure they would appreciate being left alone.”

 

“But Eduardo has issues to work through with me,” Mark points out, like it’s obvious.

 

“Or so you think,” Chris counters. Mark opens his mouth to say something along the lines of _point zero three per cent_ or _six hundred million dollar lawsuit_ but Chris cuts him off. “I think, in light of what happened, we should consider the idea that Eduardo has things going on inside his head that we don’t understand.”

 

“He didn’t tell us we weren’t welcome,” Dustin points out amiably. He never gets sucked into arguments. People always think that at heart, Dustin and Mark are alike because they’re both Red Bell and code addicts, but Mark isn’t sure that he himself and Chris don’t have more in common, personality-wise. They both come at an argument from opposing logical camps and Chris has the capacity, like Mark, to be terrifying if you get on his bad side. Dustin is just in a good mood ninety-five per cent of the time.

 

Chris looks thoughtfully at Dustin when he says this, and Mark thinks, _not fair_. He doesn’t need Dustin to win his argument for him just because he and Chris have a maybe-thing going on. Of course, if he said that aloud, Chris would look astonished and Dustin would look guilty and they would both deny it, which is just typical. Sometimes Mark doesn’t understand why everyone thinks he’s the emotionally distant one. Chris hasn’t had a relationship last longer than eight seconds for as long as Mark has known him. And Dustin... well, being happy all the time is an impossibility so he’s just better than the rest of them at hiding something, Mark is sure of it.

 

Which is giving Dustin an incredible amount of credit, but Mark has learned not to underestimate him where these things are concerned.

 

“That’s true,” Chris is saying, “but we can’t go when his sister has expressly called to forbid it. Especially since... I mean, Mark, if she called you directly, it’s because Eduardo gave her your phone number. Right? He was pretty messed up when we saw him yesterday. He may have changed his mind about it being okay for us to visit.”

 

Dustin glances uneasily at Mark. “Well, we kind of got into it with him, didn’t we?” And by _we_ , he means _Mark_ , Mark knows. “We sort of made him talk about his dad dying. I could kind of see if he changed his mind.”

 

And then Mark knows what Chris is doing, coming around to win Dustin over to his side like a _sneak_ , and Mark glowers at him. Chris looks evenly back.

 

“So what now?” Mark demands. “He could be months getting out of the hospital. Are we supposed to just ignore that he’s right there in San Francisco?”

 

“Well, the truth of it is, you’ve been kind of ignoring him for years, Mark,” Chris says gently. “A few more months won’t hurt. And then when he gets out, maybe you guys can have a real conversation.”

 

There is a pause.

 

“Get out of my office, I have work to do,” Mark says instead of answering, and Chris and Dustin exchange a significant look that Mark can feel pass over his head.


	4. Aftermath

“Doctor Stacy says that you shouldn’t live alone for the next six months or so,” Natalia says.

 

Behind her, a nurse opens the door, quiet as a church mouse, and glances in. Presumably, Eduardo thinks, she loses interest when she sees that Eduardo has not hung himself (with the bed-sheets that don’t rip or come free from the mattress), slit his wrists (with the dulled plastic cutlery he is allowed), or taken all of his pain meds at once (impossible, since they dole them out in precise doses and check to make sure he’s swallowed them).

 

“I know,” Eduardo replies, glancing back at his sister as the nurse closes the door. She will be back in half an hour. When Natalia goes back to her hotel and he is alone in the room, the nurse checks back once every ten minutes. Eduardo gathers that they are relatively certain that he can’t do lasting damage to himself in just ten minutes. They are probably right, since he can’t get out of bed by himself and they have child-proofed his room. Even the window only opens four inches. That’s probably the first one they secured, Eduardo thinks; apparently he has a reputation for a making a hobby of falling from great heights now.

 

“They also want you to stay in the area,” Natalia continues. “They need you to come in once a week to meet with this doctor, that psychiatrist...” She waves a hand. “You know.”

 

“I don’t know if I could face flying right now anyway,” Eduardo admits. Something about experiencing a four-second fall permeates your bones; he doesn’t like the idea of being more than two or three stories off the ground.

 

Natalia nods. “So I’ll move here. No problem.”

 

Eduardo stares at her, startled. Initially, he is not sure why the idea bothers him so much. “No, no – Nat, you _can’t_.”

 

She raises an eyebrow. “Why can’t I?”

 

Eduardo scrambles, grasping for an explanation. “Because you have a job – a _career_. Right?”

 

Natalia shrugs. “It’s just a job, Edi. You’re my kid brother. That’s more important.”

 

“You love your job,” Eduardo points out flatly. He is on solid footing now, even though this is not what he set out to say. If he could explain his feelings about living with her, he would, but they are crawling all over each other under his ribs and he can’t get a hold on one at a time to read them. He blames it on the pain meds, or maybe his thoughts will always be a little disconnected now, slightly uncoordinated. Maybe they were jarred loose in the fall. Who knows? “When you got your promotion a couple of months ago, we had champagne via Skype and you fired the girl who had been competing with you for the job. Plus you travel all the time and I’m not supposed to be left alone.”

 

Natalia scoffs. “I can find a new job. You don’t have to worry about me.”

 

“I don’t want you to move here,” Eduardo says, more forcefully, and for the first time there is a trace of something else in his tone.

 

“Why not?” Natalia challenges. Whatever mix of genetics came down from their parents that made Eduardo the sensitive one, with his heart on his sleeve and his interest in meteorology and his talent for numbers, made Natalia the hard-edged one with no sympathy or patience for dissent. She is her father’s daughter.

 

It’s what fuels the discussion that follows, for her as well as Eduardo, because on some level he is picking this fight with her right now to see her react. However contrary and punishing and confusing this is, he _misses_ that reaction right down into the halls of his bones. His father was many things; easy to love was not one of them. But Eduardo can’t stop the ache in his chest anyway, like something is gone that he will never, ever get back. And now Natalia is here and it is like he can hear echoes, however faint, of the man who cast his shadow over Eduardo’s childhood and consequently, the rest of his life.

 

Natalia continues, an edge in her voice. “Who are you going to stay with? _Mark_?”

 

“ _No_ ,” Eduardo snaps.

 

“You let him visit you,” she retorts. “You let him come and look at you, weak like this – ”

 

“I’m not _weak_ , I’m _injured_ , and I’ll _get better_ ,” Eduardo says, through gritted teeth.

 

 “He is not your _friend_ , Eduardo, he cut you out of his company so fast and so clean, it was practically _surgical –_ ”

 

Eduardo can’t even let her finish. “I know what he did!”

 

“So, what, you have a near-death experience and now you want to forgive him? Is that it? Now bygones are bygones and the two of you are going to sit together on his bed and make candy bracelets and braid each other’s hair?” Natalia is livid, and not for the first time, Eduardo wonders about her anger at Mark. He is unsure, and has been for awhile, that it is on his behalf. Or perhaps part of it is, and even a good part of it, but not all of it.

 

Natalia is a _Saverin_. Like their father was. It is not just a last name; it is code for something much bigger. It is a set of privileges and ethics and rules, a standard to live by. So that means the lawsuit follows her around too. It is the family shadow that they cannot sweep under the rug and it is Mark’s fault.

 

It is Eduardo’s fault too, but Natalia will always blame Mark first and leave the rest unsaid. Eduardo wonders if he is grateful that she doesn’t throw it in his lap and make him explain himself and apologize and feel ashamed, but all he can think is that they grew up in a house where unpleasant things were ignored or punished, and now it is carrying on into their adulthood. Sometimes Eduardo wishes they could acknowledge what happened for what it was and move on with their lives. He can’t really talk, though; he’s as caught up in it still as his sister, or even more-so.

 

“I don’t want to forgive him,” Eduardo argues. “I just – I’m not in a good head space. Can you understand that? He came with Dustin and Chris and I was messed up on pain meds and I was just too tired to keep up the – yelling and door-slamming. Metaphorically and literally.”

 

Eduardo does wonder, though, if maybe this _is_ actually a life-is-short thing. He hasn’t had an epiphany or anything, but it’s like the rage that burned under the surface of his skin for so long after the dilution has been snuffed out. Come to think of it, he hasn’t had the capacity to get himself properly into a rage for a long time. It’s like he’s spent the past few months being too worn out to bother.

 

So maybe no sane person would want to find themselves in the same room as the best friend who screwed them over, but Eduardo’s not quite on the sane train anymore so he thinks he can be forgiven.

 

“Edi,” Natalia says, and her voice has softened. Eduardo is not fooled. This is a tactic she has used in arguments since they were very young. “I just want to make sure he can’t take advantage of you again.”

 

Eduardo watches her, wondering if he’s imagining the note of condescension into her tone. Maybe he is, but it’s hard to tell these days. “Thank you for watching out for me. But I don’t need it.”

 

Natalia’s eyebrow cocks. “Oh?”

 

Eduardo hates all the things she insinuates with one word: _That’s what you said right before he cut you out of his multi-billion dollar company,_ and _I read about you and that gringo in the newspaper for months and none of it was flattering and I won’t do it again,_ and even _You don’t even know what you need, my damaged little brother._

 

“I learned from what happened,” Eduardo insists, keeping his temper in check. If he loses it, she wins. “I haven’t trusted anyone since. Not the way I trusted him. So you can keep your concern, I’ll be just fine without it.”

 

Natalia’s lips press into a thin line. For once, Eduardo has no idea what she’s thinking about. Eventually, all she says is, “So who will you stay with?”

 

\--

 

It has been two weeks since the accident, and Eduardo is no closer to an answer to that question. Natalia returns to Miami for two or three days at a time now, and when she comes back, she is always in the hallway on her Blackberry or talking about life at the office and eventually Eduardo comes to the conclusion that he is kind of on his own here. She doesn’t mean to do it but she’s a very driven person and she gets sucked into her projects at work. Besides, she has a tendency to check out – that is, her attention drifts – when she isn’t allowed to be in total control in a situation, and where Eduardo is concerned, she most certainly is not.

 

The medical team behind Eduardo’s treatment has determined that he needs to talk to someone on a very, very regular basis. A shrink comes in to talk to Eduardo about the things that precipitated his fall – which Eduardo is still not acknowledging is a suicide attempt, because he can’t even put the pieces in his head together to match that pattern so it doesn’t make sense to him why he would _ever_ do that – and Eduardo talks to yet another shrink about how he feels about his future.

 

Because Eduardo’s future has a different look to it than it ever did before. He’s not sure what he was anticipating out of the next five years before The Fall, but he has radically altered his expectations now. He has enough broken bones below the waist and enough of a serious back injury that he might not even be able to walk by then. His wrist is held together by pins on the inside, though luckily it’s the one that he doesn’t write with (which he guesses is kind of like a consolation prize in the Hand Injury Olympics). He didn’t injure his brain during the impact – thank God – but somehow he was on that bridge and somehow he fell and Eduardo doesn’t think that’s a signal of totally healthy grey matter. So that’s going to take some fixing too, and all in all Eduardo can’t even consider an end goal right now because there are an overwhelming amount of smaller steps to take first.

 

During his third or fourth session with the first shrink – Doctor Rosetanni – she asks him about Mark, and he shuts her down right away. He doesn’t want to get into that, honestly. It’s not that Eduardo doesn’t see how the doctor thinks there might be a connection between all of that and what happened, it’s just that it’s painful and she’s a stranger and Eduardo _won’t_.

 

The more the days pass, though, the more Eduardo is conscious of how many pills they’re giving him and how many times a day they check up on him and how much help he needs to get around and complete even the simplest tasks. It creates a picture for him that he doesn’t like, but he has to face the fact that they’re keeping an eye on him and making note of every little way he reacts and behaves, and that his physical healing is _infuriatingly_ slow. So maybe, he thinks, he can talk to this woman about Mark and everything else and they can check some more boxes off on their chart – _mental health; improved!_ – and eventually take him off suicide watch and let him go _home_.

 

That doesn’t make it easier to open up, though.

 

It’s odd, because Eduardo’s always been a candid type of person. He would freely own up to wearing his heart on his sleeve, and being quick to trust is what fucked him over where Mark is concerned to begin with. That, he’s pretty sure, is the crux of the problem – he doesn’t need a shrink to know that it’s Mark’s fault that Eduardo looks at everyone sideways.

 

Still, Doctor Rosetanni is a nice woman and Eduardo does his best.

 

“So tell me about what your relationship with Mark was like at Harvard.”

 

Eduardo picks at his sleeve for a moment, the one that is pulled over the cast. “We were friends.”

 

“Just friends?” She prods gently.

 

“Just friends,” Eduardo affirms.  There is a loose thread in his sweater. It is not the type of sweater he would have been fond of before The Fall but now it is exactly the kind of too-big, stretched-out old thing he can curl up in, and it accommodates his cast and his IV tube and all of the other accoutrements of being broken. Eduardo pulls at the thread, and it begins to unravel. “You know – best friends, I think. I mean, there were Chris and Dustin too but they were Mark’s roommates and they kind of ended up having to be friends with him by default. Don’t – don’t get me wrong, they care about the guy, but I was... you know. The first one who hung around because I wanted to.”

 

The doctor nods. “It sounds like it’s important to you that you were important to him.”

 

Eduardo looks up at her, baffled. “Of course.”

 

“Do you think you’re important, Eduardo?” She asks.

 

“I’m sorry?” Eduardo is puzzled by the question. In the grand scheme of things, or...?

 

“Think about your relationships,” she suggests. “Are you important to other people?”

 

Eduardo gives it some thought. “I mean – my mother and my sister,” he says hesitantly.

 

“Friends?” The doctor pursues.

 

“Not – close ones. Not anymore.”

 

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

 

“No.” Eduardo feels like she is chasing him down some kind of rabbit hole, but damned if he knows where it’s going.

 

“Do you think it’s hard to become important in someone else’s life?”

 

Eduardo gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. Other people do it, don’t they?”

 

“I meant you.” The doctor is unsmiling.

 

“Not – not necessarily.” But Eduardo is stumbling over his thoughts and his words and he knows immediately that he doesn’t have an answer that will send her away from here – if he’s even right about where _here_ is. “I think Mark and I are each other’s foils,” he says, and it’s not even an evasion so much as the beginning of a roundabout way to get to the answer. “I think – I mean, one of the reasons why I liked him right away, when I met him, was that he was so unlike me. I knew he’d never listened politely while someone gave him hell or bothered to do his hair on a Sunday even if he was planning to stay in and study. And I guess... you know, he’s not an emotional person. So when I caught the odd hint that he did more than tolerate my presence, it was like I’d... _won_ something, and – God, this sounds so bizarre when I have to explain it.”

 

“You valued being important to him more because it was difficult to achieve,” the doctor concludes for him, and she doesn’t seem to think it’s bizarre at all.

 

“I – I guess,” Eduardo acknowledges, which he kind of already knew but he really, really wants her to stop there.

 

And then she says: “Did you feel like you were important to your father?”

 

They had talked about Mr. Saverin before, and she has a pretty good idea of what he was like while Eduardo was growing up. Of course, Eduardo sidesteps and deliberately makes things vague, but she’s good at what she does and she probably has a solid picture anyway.

 

“Uh.” Eduardo isn’t looking at her again, fixated on the loose ends of his sleeve. “I was his son.”

 

Eduardo can feel the doctor’s eyes on him, patient but unyielding. “That’s not what I mean.”

 

“I know,” Eduardo replies without heat. “But I don’t know how to answer the question. Did I matter to him? Yes – otherwise why bother being hard on me? He wanted me to be better. You don’t want that for someone you don’t give a shit about.”

 

“Eduardo – ” the doctor begins, sensing that he’s pulling away, but Eduardo beats her to it.

 

“Did I feel like I was important to him? Me, personally, rather than the _idea_ of a son? No.” His chest is rising and falling quickly under the bulky sweater. “No. Okay? Not in the way that mattered. But he’s gone and it _doesn’t_ matter.”

 

Eduardo doesn’t leave – it’s hard for him to wheel his chair with one hand, since his wrist is still mostly unusable – but he emotionally checks out, and after a moment, Doctor Rosetanni leans back in her chair with a sigh and ends the session.


	5. Propulsion

“Come over,” Dustin says, flopped in the reclining chair in his living room. He has the phone tucked between shoulder and ear, and he’s staring intently at the TV screen as he murders his enemies.

 

“I can’t,” Chris replies, sounding distracted. “I’ve got to pack for New York.”

 

“Pack for New York tomorrow,” Dustin says dismissively.

 

“I _can’t_ pack for New York tomorrow, I’m leaving tomorrow,” Chris answers. On the other end of the line, he is rummaging through piles of clothes in his suddenly disorganized room, glad that Dustin isn’t there to witness (and make fun of) his abrupt burst of slobishness. He always gets like this when he’s packing to go somewhere. Traveling makes him anxious for some reason unless he packs the right combination of clothes. He doesn’t think that’s an indication of vanity so much as some kind of weird fetish for comfort-packing. People comfort-eat, don’t they?

 

“Yeah, so, pack in the morning,” Dustin says. “Obama will understand. Plus your flight doesn’t leave ‘til, like, two o’clock. _Yes._ ”

 

Chris raises an eyebrow in response to the incongruous end to Dustin’s sentence. “Sorry?”

 

“I just straight-up Columbian neck-tied the dude who’s been calling me a fag on X-Box Live all night,” Dustin explains, pleased with himself. On-screen, he makes his character do a leaping victory dance.

 

Chris winces. He’s never been a fan of that particular slur. “The dark recesses of the internet, huh?”

 

“Well, he also called me a cock-hat and a wrinkly nad-pool so we’re not talking about a guy who possesses the height of intellect here.” Dustin button mashes furiously as the obnoxious other player re-spawns and comes after him.

 

“No, I guess not.” Chris kneels to look under the bed for a missing shoe.

 

“So come over,” Dustin says again, as though the brief conversation they’ve had in the interim since the last time he said that never happened. “I want to talk to you about something. Plus I’m not gonna see you for, like, a week and a half and you’re leaving me _all alone_ with Unhinged Mark.” Dustin makes a pathetic face that Chris can almost see through the phone line.

 

Chris takes a sweeping glance of his room. It is hopelessly untidy. He supposes he _can_ get up early and pack; he took the whole day off from work, after all. Of course, he’d sort of planned to go in anyway and keep an eye on Mark in the wake of all of this sudden Eduardo business, but he could probably trust that to Dustin.

 

“All right,” he says finally with a sigh, and Dustin whoops on the other end of the phone.

 

“Dude, stop and get pizza on the way. I don’t have any food here.”

 

Chris rolls his eyes, not unkindly. “What else is new? I’ll stop and get Subway.”

 

“ _No,_ ” Dustin whines. “It’s a pizza night, Chris. It feels like a pizza night.”

 

“Yeah, well, it probably felt like a pizza night the last five nights in a row,” Chris replies lightly.

 

“Not so,” Dustin declares triumphantly.

 

“Oh, my God. Was there a night when you _didn’t_ have pizza?” Chris asks, sounding over-awed.

 

“If you must know, last night I went for coffee with Lauren from your department – marketing or public relations or something, she said? – and coffee turned into _pancakes._ ” Dustin sounds delighted. “I found a girl who likes _brinner_ , Chris.”

 

Which is, of course, breakfast-for-dinner.

 

“You – wow, that’s exciting.” Chris’ tone has an odd note in it. He sounds happy for Dustin, but there is a weird quality to it that makes it seem perhaps just a little off.

 

“It is,” Dustin agrees, beaming. “That’s what I was going to tell you when you came over. Plus I was going to ask you for advice.”

 

 “Because I haven’t been within striking distance of a vagina since high school?” Chris sounds vaguely amused now, the odd note from before gone as fast as it appeared, and Dustin decides he was imagining it.

 

“Do not front, Christopher,” Dustin says sternly. “Let’s not pretend that you don’t have a way with the ladies. You’re like the Girl Whisperer.”

 

“Okay, well, sure,” Chris says, despite himself. “Fire away.”

 

“I thought you were coming over,” Dustin accuses. “This is _romance_ , Chris. It cannot be done via the unromantic telephone.”

 

“You know what, I think I’m going to stay in,” Chris tells him. Even he can’t say where this sudden change of heart came from, although he doesn’t examine it too closely because that way lies madness. “I’ve got a lot of packing to do.”

 

“Yeah, but I talked you out of that,” Dustin complains.

 

“Yeah, and I talked myself back into it,” Chris answers. “You know I get weird about flying. I’ll just feel better if I get this done.”

 

There is a brief silence. Then: “Fine,” Dustin relents. “But I need you to call me from New York, stat. By the second date I can no longer fool a girl like Lauren with my gentlemanliness and hilarious jokes. She’ll want something of _substance._ I don’t have any of that. So I need you to help me fake it.”

 

“Come on, Dustin,” Chris protests. “You have plenty of substance.”

 

“Do not,” Dustin says amiably. “It’s my tragic flaw. Anyway, go do your packing. I’m going to order a pizza and get fat and greasy all by myself. Later, bro.”

 

After he hangs up, Chris tosses his phone onto the bed, into the mess of clothes, and brings his wrist to his temple like he’s nursing a headache. He’s going to go to New York for nine days and when he comes back, this buzzing in his skull when he thinks about everything that Dustin just said will be gone.

 

\--

 

Sean is lounging on the couch across from Mark’s desk, and Mark has a sudden urge to tell him to stop putting his feet on the cushions like a damn heathen. He shakes it off because the urge occurs in his mother’s voice and Mark learned a long time ago that anything in his mother’s voice is well-meaning but has little relevance to his actual life.

 

Sean doesn’t come into the office that often anymore, which is probably good because now that Facebook is the biggest-ticket thing on the planet, Sean’s role in its development is pretty much over. He’ll show up to ask about how things are going and talk a little bit of shop, but mostly, from Mark’s perspective, he seems to come in with the express purpose of distracting Mark and being uncannily irritating.

 

Mark doesn’t have any illusions left about Sean, in case anyone was wondering. He really doesn’t. He remembers the Million Members party and the way Sean wound up Eduardo, pushing things into a dangerous, surreal territory where they didn’t belong before Mark, speechless for once, could gather his thoughts. And then it had seemed like only moments later when Sean had called him, breathless and paranoid, from a police station. Mark had managed to sweep that one under the rug – well, Chris had done most of the heavy lifting – but then Sean had done it again. And again.

 

And eventually, Mark stopped taking his phone calls.

 

Removing Sean from any official capacity in the company was easier than removing Eduardo, on pretty much every level. Mark let their big-ticket investors talk Sean into resigning, and after that, there didn’t even seem to be any hard feelings. Sean just came by less often.

 

Sean still acts like old self of course, and he doesn’t really acknowledge the fundamental shift in their relationship; that Mark tolerates him now instead of idolizing him; that Mark doesn’t _need him_ anymore. That’s okay with Mark since it’s not like he wants to have a long dialogue about it either. As long as Sean keeps his visits to once or twice a month and doesn’t try to interfere too much, Mark lets him – what were Sean’s words, again? Decades or centuries ago? – parade around in his ridiculous suits, acting like he runs this company.

 

Or – well, some reasonable facsimile of that, anyway. Mark likes the cool irony of borrowing Sean’s glib insults to apply them to the man himself, even though Mark doesn’t let Sean come anywhere near representing himself as someone in charge of anything of importance at Facebook.

 

“So, this Wardo thing,” Sean is saying, tossing a stress ball in the air and catching it, overhand. Mark steadfastly refuses to flinch when he does it, even though Sean has already missed it once and narrowly avoided knocking over the mug of pens on Mark’s desk.

 

Mark doesn’t really look up from his laptop, but Sean has learned from years of this that Mark is very capable of typing and listening at the same time. He doesn’t like to do it, but Sean reasons that if it bothered him that much, he’d quit typing and acknowledge that someone’s talking to him. Besides, Mark gets away with being as arrogant as he wants to be. Some people want to say that’s because he’s the world’s youngest billionaire ( _second youngest_ , chimes out Dustin’s voice in Sean’s head), CEO of a successful company that he built himself, and with an IQ so high that he can’t even conduct a reasonable conversation with most average people. Sean knows better, though, or at least, he knows that Mark isn’t arrogant because of Facebook. The arrogance came before that, from back when Mark knew that he was better, smarter, more talented than other people but just didn’t have anything to show for it yet, to _prove_ it to the world.

 

“Did he really jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?” Sean doesn’t ask like he needs Mark to confirm it; of course he’s read all the news stories. Sean whistles. “That’s pretty ballsy. I think I’d swallow a bottle of Aspirin or something, if it were me.”

 

“Men are statistically more likely to commit suicide in violent ways, like shooting themselves or jumping from buildings or bridges,” Mark says, still intent on his computer screen. “Besides, he says it wasn’t a suicide attempt.”

 

Sean snorts. “Yeah, all right. He just thought he’d go for a swim in a five thousand dollar suit after throwing himself into a rock cut at eighty miles an hour, which is probably what that river felt like when he hit it.”

 

Mark has no reply for that, so Sean just tosses the stress ball a few more times.

 

“So did you visit him?” Sean ventures after awhile.

 

“Yeah.” Mark bites his lip, the intensity of his typing increasing.

 

“And?” Sean’s eyebrows do a wobble, like he’s trying to give Mark a meaningful look without coming across as, you know, _too_ curious.

 

“And what?” Mark asks, for all the world like he’s not really paying attention.

 

“ _And_ , is he... you know. Messed up?” Sean seems to realize he’s worded that slightly terribly after it comes out, but there’s no help for it now.

 

Mark looks up then, his eyes narrowed, and that’s when Sean becomes aware that Mark’s ire has been rising the entire time. “No, he just got his suit wet.” Mark’s tone of voice is razor-sharp. “ _Of course he’s messed up,_ he fell off a _bridge._ ”

 

Sean raises his hands quickly in surrender. “Sorry, man, sorry. I worded that badly. I’m sorry. I just wanted to know, you know, how it went. Because you guys obviously didn’t part on the best of terms so I’m kind of curious to know how he dealt with you just showing up in his hospital room like it’s 2003.”

 

Mark regards Sean for a moment longer, and then he pushes away from his desk and spins his desk chair around, to look at the long California skyline.

 

“He was on a lot of pain medication.” Mark doesn’t say anything else for a moment. Then: “His sister called and told us not to come back. So there’s nothing more – nothing else. That’s all.”

 

Sean nods. Conversation closed, he guesses. “That’s rough, man. Sorry to hear that. But I guess you guys aren’t tight anymore. It was probably more of a courtesy visit than anything, right?”

 

Mark shrugs. “Yeah.”

 

Sean changes the subject, and Mark comes away from the glass.

 

\--

 

“Okay, buddy, prepare yourself for...” Dustin flings the back door leading out of the hospital open dramatically. “...the light of day.”

 

Eduardo squints in the suddenly bright sunlight. He is bundled up despite the breezy California weather, in the same sweater he’s been draping around himself since the accident with a blanket gathered over top. Dustin has to push him in the wheelchair, since his wrist is healing, and Eduardo huddles down inside of the fabric of the blanket; from behind, all Dustin can see is an unruly tuft of dark hair. That is a dramatic change in its own right; Eduardo hasn’t done his hair since the accident, or at least, he hasn’t when Dustin’s come by.

 

The way these visits came about was not entirely above-board, but Dustin doesn’t really care. He doesn’t tell Mark about them, because Mark would want to come, and Dustin doesn’t think that Eduardo wants that or needs it at this point. Even if he does, he and Mark have all of this dirty laundry to air and put behind them, and Eduardo always seems too exhausted, from Dustin’s point of view, to argue about anything. Besides, Dustin had to call Natalia and reason with her for a long time before she relented and told the hospital staff that it was okay for him to come by. Mostly he had to promise her that Mark wouldn’t be included in his visits, and that he _really_ hadn’t known about the dilution of Eduardo’s shares before they happened. (It kind of scares Dustin, how intense she is about that; Dustin’s not even sure Eduardo feels as strongly as his sister does anymore. There is real _rage_ there. Dustin’s not going to pretend it wasn’t a shitty thing, but it also feels like a _long_ time ago. And Eduardo is in a place where he doesn’t need to be focusing on that anymore).

 

So Natalia tells the hospital staff that Dustin is, in fact, Eduardo’s step-brother (or whatever she tells them), and Dustin comes by every couple of days after work. Sometimes he brings games with him; Eduardo likes Scrabble and other kinds of old-fashioned board games that Dustin forgot existed since the advent of video games. Eduardo explains that he and his grandparents used to have family game nights in Brazil when he was young, which seems kind of incongruous to Dustin given his mental image of Eduardo’s family, but whatever. It sounds like these are good memories and that’s probably something Eduardo should spend more time dwelling on.

 

Dustin also brings Eduardo a laptop so that he can check his e-mail and do whatever he likes to do on the internet, although as far as Dustin can tell he doesn’t really open the computer. Eduardo mentions vaguely once that he watched a movie on it, but that’s as far as it goes.

 

Today is the first time that Dustin has been allowed to take Eduardo outside. The hospital is starting to relax their grip on him, bit by bit. Eduardo mentions that their checks are less frequent now, and they let Natalia and Dustin wheel him around the hallways for brief periods, exploring until Eduardo gets tired. This happens after barely any time at all at first, but Eduardo gets stronger, and finally one of the nurses relents and allows Dustin to wheel Eduardo out into the daylight.

 

Dustin’s not sure how Eduardo feels about this. He is curled into the blankets with his eyes mostly shut, his head sort of nodding a little, and though Dustin keeps up a steady stream of chatter, Eduardo doesn’t really seem to acknowledge it. Eventually Dustin pulls up next to a picnic table and clambers on top of it, sitting next to Eduardo. He lapses into silence, gazing up into the sunshine.

 

“Dustin.” Eduardo’s voice sounds crackly, which is probably because he doesn’t speak much, even when he does have visitors.

 

“Yeah, man.” They are sitting comfortably, companionably.

 

“They’re not going to let me out of here unless I have someone I can stay with.”

 

Dustin looks at him in surprise. “You can’t stay with your sister?”

 

Eduardo doesn’t return his gaze. His eyes are fixed on the pavement, fifteen feet away. “She lives in Miami. I have to stay here. Near the hospital.” He doesn’t explain the argument that he and Natalia had; how he doesn’t want to be her project for the next year or two years or forever, depending on if he stops being fucked up or not.

 

“Oh.” Dustin shrugs. “Well, come stay with me.”

 

He says it so easily, like it’s nothing at all. Like they’re in college still and Eduardo wants to crash at his place overnight after a party or needs to borrow a textbook before a test.

 

Eduardo remembers suddenly that he and Dustin were friends first, before he ever met Mark.

 

They met in freshman year, in the intro class they shared as fellow economics majors. Dustin sneaked in late the first day and spent the rest of the class making Eduardo have to hide that he was cracking up while Dustin poked fun at the professor and the content of the class. (“I think I came into the wrong class. This is Advanced Sorcery, right? I was supposed to be in Econ for Dummies.”) When the class ended, Dustin had asked Eduardo for his notes from the part of the class he had missed and from that moment on they had always made a point to sit next to one another in classes they shared. Dustin was, Eduardo notes with some surprise, his first friend at Harvard.

 

“Yeah? Is that okay?” Eduardo asks. He does look at Dustin now, his eyes still slits against the brightness of the sun, but the way the light catches them they look almost tawny under his eyelids. “It’s going to be – I mean, I’m not just going to be a casual roomie, I’m going to need some help.”

 

“Yeah,” Dustin replies easily. “I know. But it’s cool, dude, it’s going to be nice seeing you around again. You can help me convince Chris that pizza _is_ a viable option for dinner every night.”

 

Eduardo smiles without meaning to, and the feeling is strange. It’s _good_ to smile like that. He realizes that he can’t remember the last time he did it.

 

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks, D-Man. I owe you.”

 

“Don’t mention it,” Dustin replies.


	6. Momentum

“Wardo’s moving in with me.”

 

Dustin says it immediately when Chris picks up the phone.

 

“Dustin?” Chris sounds groggy. Dustin realizes that it is past midnight in New York.

 

“Sorry for calling so late, dude. I forgot about the time difference. But yes. Wardo. Moving in with me. It’s happening.”

 

There’s a pause. Then: “Just a minute.”

 

The sounds of Chris getting out of bed, slipping across a room, and closing the door behind him echo down the line. Dustin feels suddenly like he walked in on his parents having sex.

 

“Are you – with somebody?”

 

“Don’t worry about it,” Chris replies. His voice is still hushed, but less than before. Dustin guesses that he has shut himself into the bathroom of his hotel room. “Eduardo is moving in with you? Wow. Did he ask, or did you volunteer?”

 

“Sort of both,” Dustin tells him. “I mean, he asked, but I was down for it. He needs to stay in the general area, plus I have the feeling that him and his sister get along better from far away. And he doesn’t really have anyone else. Like, he could stay with you, but you travel a lot. And obviously staying with Mark isn’t a viable option.”

 

Chris snorts. “Mark forgot to wear pants to class once in freshman year; he can hardly look after himself, never mind someone who’s going to be as time-consuming and demanding as Eduardo will be.”

 

“Yeah, this is going to be kind of a – thing, isn’t it,” Dustin agrees, which is pretty much why he called Chris to begin with. “I think I’m going to need help.”

 

“I’m going to help, you don’t have to worry about that,” Chris promises.

 

“But.” And Dustin is suddenly anxious. “He can’t shower or – or pee by himself and I’m supposed to check on him sometimes – a lot – in the night and I have _stairs_ leading up to my front door, even.”

 

“Relax,” Chris says soothingly. “You’re richer than God, Dustin, have a contractor come by and build a wheelchair ramp. And hire a nurse to help him with the day-to-day stuff. You can wheel him around and cook for him – God help us on that front, I hope he likes pizza – but leave the rest to the trained professionals.”

 

Dustin expels a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It’s just, I offered, you know, and then after I panicked.”

 

“It was good of you to offer,” Chris tells him firmly. “Honestly, I think he could use a few friends around. Just...” He sighs, suddenly, as though something has just occurred to him. “We’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with Mark.”

 

“Deal with Mark?” Dustin echoes.

 

“Well, he can’t just drop in whenever anymore,” Chris points out. “It’s not okay to do that to Eduardo. He and Mark had a serious falling out and we have to respect his feelings. Plus, he’s coming back from... well, he jumped off a bridge, so probably not a really solid mental situation, and Mark hovering around waiting for him to get well enough to yell at is probably not conducive to the healing process.”

 

“I wish this just... got fixed,” Dustin says, sounding faintly exasperated.

 

“Unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that,” Chris answers soberly.

 

“Yeah.” Dustin considers the state of things, silent for a long moment. He hears Chris shift on the other end.

 

“Listen, D-Man, it’s getting late,” Chris says, and Dustin suddenly remembers, with a little bump, _oh, he’s with – somebody._

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dustin answers. “Of course. Sorry again, bro, I totally forgot about the time difference. I’ll call you tomorrow?”

 

“Yeah,” Chris agrees. “I’ll talk to you then.”

 

Dustin holds the phone in his hand for a long time after Chris hangs up, imagining him drifting, shadow-like, across a dark room, and sliding into bed next to a stranger.

 

\--

 

Back at Harvard, Eduardo had had a single room. It was a tight-walled, cramped space, with walls painted a cheerless beige and just enough room for a bed, a desk, and a narrow section of shelves. There was a kind of hierarchy to the sleeping situations that went like this:

 

First years, scholarship students, and those on a budget slept in dormitories like the one Chris, Dustin, and Mark had shared.

 

Older students were entered into a lottery, and some slept in singles like Eduardo’s or dormitories again, depending on their luck.

 

People who came from serious money, like the Winklevosses, had to deal with the lottery, but they were also the members of prestigious final clubs for the most part and could spend a lot of time around old-world glamour even if their actual rooms weren’t that nice.

 

And then, of course, you could live off-campus if you really wanted to.

 

Eduardo had had the kind of money to put himself up in a nicer room.

 

He didn’t do it, of course, and the reasons for that were twofold. The first was that his mother wanted him in a Jewish fraternity, a proper one where, Eduardo gathered, she thought that they would get together and discuss the Torah and revel in their Jewishness together. A room too nice, she’d told him, and he’d never know what it was like to live in a real brotherhood, sharing bathrooms and kitchens and whatever else. Eduardo had always reflected on that later with amusement and a little bit of bitterness; he’d never been particularly close with his fraternity brothers, spending most of his time at Kirkland by the end of freshman year.

 

The second reason was that his father thought it was frivolous waste of money to upgrade to an off-campus apartment on the nicer side of Boston. Eduardo had never even brought it up with him but his father had taken a run at the idea anyway, proclaiming that the only kind of man who was _worthwhile_ spent time _working_ for the perks in his life, and that as a bonus, Eduardo would get more work done in the kind of room where he wasn’t distracted.

 

So Eduardo had lived in one drab, single room after another for four years. All of this occurs to him again now as he waits for Dustin and Chris to pick him up at the hospital. His room here reminds him of that Harvard room, except this one comes with the best medical care money can buy; Eduardo has so much money that he no longer thinks of things in terms of _frivolous_ or _superfluous_ , he just spends money where he thinks it is merited.

 

A nurse is talking to him, and Eduardo makes an effort to pay attention. She is giving him strict instructions about his medication, his visits to the hospital, his physiotherapy, the kind of supervision he should have, et cetera. Eduardo wishes she would stop talking so he can remember what it’s like to want to go somewhere.

 

He had actually been startled to discover that he was looking forward to going to Dustin’s house. It’s a fragile feeling, small and quivering under his heart, so he holds tightly to it and tries to multitask. Eventually the nurse’s voice becomes like water, washing over him, and he forgets to listen.

 

When Dustin and Chris show up, she repeats the whole thing anyway. Chris actually takes notes while Dustin makes sure that all of Eduardo’s things are packed up (there isn’t much – the laptop, the small bag of personal effects that they took off him after The Fall that Eduardo won’t even look at, never mind open, and a crumpled photo that is wedged between the radiator and the wall, fluttering lightly in the in-pouring of warm air. The photo is of a man on his hands and knees on the floor of someone’s kitchen, intently focused as he races toy trucks with a small boy. The boy is grinning like anything. Something about it makes Dustin’s heart stick in his throat and he takes extra care to tuck the photograph safely into his jacket).

 

Finally, they are ready to go, and Chris wheels Eduardo sedately down the corridors while Dustin sort of hovers around them, talking excitedly. From what Eduardo can gather, Dustin is really excited about having a roommate again, which kind of makes a warm spot in Eduardo’s chest . He has all these plans, like him and Eduardo are going to be partners in crime and for the first time in awhile, Eduardo thinks, _okay._ Maybe this can be _okay._ Because he’s not going home to an empty condo and he has real friends again and they show an absurd interest in taking care of him.

 

But Eduardo’s not going to kid himself. He knows that the things that have been pulling him down are still there, swimming around in his mind like intruders who know all the pass codes and unlocked windows to get into the house. He has been talking to his psychiatrist – now just one; they’ve narrowed it down – like he is supposed to, but she hasn’t given him anything really insightful in awhile, and Eduardo wonders grimly if they have reached a dead end. He can’t pull out anything else from inside of him, can’t lay his insides out on the table for her to look at, because they are connected to everything vital under his skin and he’ll – he’ll die, maybe, or something worse if he shows her. Because he doesn’t want to look at any of that stuff. Looking at that stuff feels like going back to when he wasn’t happy, and he’s sort of... tentatively content now, which is, you know – he’ll take it.

 

So Dustin and Chris help him into the car – which is a nice way of putting it; they don’t so much help him as _hoist_ his weight as carefully as they can – and Eduardo needs help putting on his seatbelt and then they are on the road. Eduardo is not upset about leaving the hospital behind him. He doesn’t look back as they drive away.

 

Dustin’s house is sort of modest, for a billionaire, although it’s still bigger than most of the other ones on the block. Chris and Dustin set Eduardo up in a room on the ground floor so that he doesn’t have to worry about any stairs, and then they give him the tour so he knows how to find the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room. Dustin says that his own room is upstairs but that Eduardo can feel free to yell for him if he ever has an emergency in the night.

 

Eduardo plans to never have any emergencies in the night. He already knows he’s stretching out his welcome by hijacking Dustin’s house like this, forcing Dustin to rearrange his life to accommodate him. Dustin honestly doesn’t seem to mind, but Eduardo feels guilty about it anyway. He has already volunteered to clean up, even though Dustin says he has a lady come in and do that. Eduardo has also insisted on paying rent, even though Dustin looks thoroughly embarrassed when Eduardo gives him a cheque and mutters something about donating the money to charity.

 

Chris is making lunch for them when Eduardo’s nurse arrives. She is a slight older woman who introduces herself as Marisa and then, in perfect Portuguese, asks Eduardo if it’s all right if she checks his room to make sure everything is suitable for him.

 

Eduardo looks at her in astonishment and then turns to Dustin and Chris, who are trying not to grin at each other. Eduardo feels a burning in the back of his eyes and has to turn away, nodding at her that of course, she can check whatever she needs to.

 

“Wardo, are you okay?” Dustin asks, sounding an absurd mix of concerned and pleased with himself.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” Eduardo says, waving him off. “Thanks... thanks for... that. You know. It’s my...” He struggles for the best way to say that Portuguese is the language that lives under his skin, next to his heart, despite all the ways he wanted to hate it for the way his father used it to box him in. Dustin kindly interrupts him and says that they know, that’s why they did it.

 

And then Eduardo isn’t sure if his eyes are wet because hearing Portuguese makes him homesick and content at the same time or if it’s because this is what it’s like to let people care about you.

 

\--

 

Chris is leaning against the railing on Dustin’s back porch, nursing a cup of tea. Dustin has already ragged on him about being an old man, because _tea, honestly_ , and Chris has loftily vowed to live to be a hundred and ten, and now they are standing together in comfortable silence. Inside, Marisa is talking to Eduardo in the kitchen, and they have passed from talking about medical technicalities to trading anecdotes in staccato Portuguese. Chris can tell because of the way they are laughing and adding on to one another’s sentences.

 

“So I think he’s feeling better,” Dustin muses, watching the two of them through the screen door.

 

“Definitely,” Chris agrees. “The Brazilian nurse was a great idea, D-Man. You won the day with that one.”

 

Dustin smiles, pleased with himself. The smile fades a little as he explains, “Well, we kind of ditched him after the whole... Mark thing. I mean, he ditched us too, he wouldn’t take our calls or anything, but we didn’t exactly make a huge effort to stay in touch. And then eventually he started e-mailing us again but we didn’t really know what was going on in his life. We didn’t really ask, we just...” He waves a hand helplessly.

 

Chris understands. “It’s not our fault, Dustin,” he says quietly.

 

Dustin looks at him, and there is an almost desperate need to be reassured looming large in his eyes. “We didn’t even know his dad died. We could’ve sent flowers. We could’ve _gone_ to the funeral.”

 

“Life happens,” Chris tells him, and he shrugs, a little uneasily. “We stayed with Mark because we stayed with Facebook, and there wasn’t really room to be best friends with Eduardo. It wouldn’t exactly have been easy, anyway; he moved to Singapore and cut us off for awhile.”

 

“Yeah.” Dustin worries at his bottom lip with his teeth as he looks back toward the kitchen window. “I kind of just wish things were different, is all.”

 

“I know. But they will be now,” Chris reassures him.

 

Dustin glances sort of sidelong at him, and in what seems like a non sequitur to Chris and an easy segue way for Dustin, Dustin says, “I’m sorry I called when you were with somebody the other night.”

 

Chris looks mildly embarrassed. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

 

Dustin nods. “Is it going to be an ongoing thing, do you think? Like, a New York thing? You, and this guy?”

 

“No,” Chris replies, startled. “He’s just a – guy, Dustin. I don’t have time for a boyfriend.”

 

“Oh.” Dustin considers that. “What about a totally non-demanding one?”

 

Chris laughs. “There’s no such thing.” He nudges Dustin’s hip with his own. “No worries, D-Man. Until this Eduardo thing resolves itself and the Obama campaign winds down, you get to suck up most of my free time.”

 

Dustin looks like he wants to say something, but he refrains. After a moment, he says, “Well, I won’t have _all_ kinds of free time. I’ve got things with Lauren. She’s teaching me to play tennis.”

 

This startles another laugh out of Chris. “Tennis sounds like something you would hate.”

 

“Why?” Dustin demands, indignant.

 

“There’s running around involved,” Chris points out, amused. “You like sports about as much as you like the new Star Wars movies.”

 

“The new Star Wars movies were a George Lucas ego project and a grave disservice to the greatest movie franchise in history and I refuse to acknowledge their existence,” Dustin recites quickly, because he can’t help himself. “But I do too like sports,” he adds defensively. “If they’re the right sports. And pretty girls are teaching me how to play them.”

 

Chris nods, still smiling. “Hey, suit yourself. Let me know how it goes.”

 

“Tennis?” Dustin asks. “Or the thing with Lauren?”

 

“Both,” Chris replies. Almost as though testing something, he adds, “Lauren’s a really nice girl.”

 

Dustin isn’t look at him right then and misses the way Chris’ mouth twists when he says it.

 

\--

 

Mark is annoyed. Dustin can already read it in the tense lines of his back when he comes into the office, and just that thought is enough to make him grimace and think wryly, _We need to spend less time together._

 

Mark swings around when he hears Dustin’s footsteps, and Dustin is unsurprised to see the familiar dark circles under Mark’s eyes like he forgot how sleep works.

 

Honestly, Dustin is pretty sure the only time he’s seen those circles go away is when Mark goes home for Christmas, and back at Harvard, when Eduardo was the only one brave enough to take his laptop away.

 

“You,” Mark snaps, and Dustin is already resigned to having this discussion.

 

“Me,” he agrees, setting his bag down next to his desk and flicking his computer off standby.

 

“Do some work today. You’re on a deadline. If I see an _I Am Disappoint_ meme before lunchtime you’re going to regret it.”

 

_Wow._ Dustin stares at Mark. Whatever he was expecting, it isn’t this. Mark turns back around and stalks into his office, flinging himself into his chair and commencing typing almost at once. Dustin watches him for a moment longer before he sits down at his desk. _Well. Okay._

 

Mark is usually an obnoxious boss, but that’s because his instructions are abrupt, to-the-point, and there is not so much as a _good job, Dustin_ for following them to the letter. He also expects excellence, but that’s probably what made Facebook so successful to begin with so Dustin doesn’t usually have any beef with that. This, though, is different. Mark doesn’t really talk to him like that, generally, with that ugly tone in his voice and the threat at the end. Usually Dustin brushes off Mark’s irritableness, but today it seems kind of serious.

 

Cowed, Dustin works most of the morning without taking a break, making a Herculean effort not to log on to Tumblr or Reddit. Chris comes by around eleven with a coffee for him, looking mildly concerned.

 

“I have never seen you go this long without checking your e-mail,” Chris informs him.

 

“Can’t talk, worker drone,” Dustin intones, although he glances up from his computer anyway, grateful for the interruption that, from a distance, might look temporarily legitimate. He glances quickly in the direction of Mark’s office, but the irritable CEO has his back to them.

 

Chris has followed his gaze and now looks back at Dustin, an eyebrow raised. “You know he can’t actually make good on probably ninety per cent of his threats, right? We live in California now, they have the death penalty.”

 

Dustin tries to smile, but honestly, Mark’s behaviour has kind of gotten under his skin at this point, and he glances back towards Mark’s office again. He can almost hear the sound of Mark coding through the glass, so furious is the aggressiveness and volume of his typing.

 

“What do you think?” Dustin says, nodding in Mark’s direction. “Is he hacking the mainframe?”

 

Chris fights a grin to stay solemn-faced. “Establishing a data link?”

 

“Taking the network offline?”

 

They both relax a little then, comfortable in the familiarity of their old eighties hacker movie jokes in reference to the way Mark is always terrifyingly focused as he _demolishes_ his keyboard. He’s honestly the only person Dustin’s ever met who has had to have his keyboard replaced _multiple times._

 

“So what’s going on, anyway?” Chris asks. “I said hello when I came into the office but he ignored me.”

 

“Which is not actually that atypical for Mark,” Dustin reminds him.

 

“No, but, usually he makes a noise at me at least.” Chris shrugs. “It’s not _words_ per se, and I’m pretty sure it’s more or less intended to express annoyance at being interrupted, but at least it’s acknowledgement. And look at you, you haven’t reblogged anything remotely simultaneously hilarious and annoying all morning. Something must be up.”

 

“You know,” Dustin begins thoughtfully, spinning his chair a one-eighty to properly survey Mark through the glass. He’s always braver about facing down Mark when Chris is around, because Dustin is the happy lunatic and Mark is the glowering sociopath so they function better when Chris is there to be the voice of reason. “He was really aggressive when I came in, but he didn’t tell _you_ to get some work done on pain of death.” He sounds faintly accusing, like Mark and Chris have rigged this up together.

 

“That’s because I always get work done,” Chris points out, mildly amused.

 

“I work!” Dustin protests, indignant.

 

“Yes,” Chris allows, “but, admittedly you also post an excessive amount to every social media website ever invented throughout the day, and you made the twin mistakes of adding Mark to your friends list on every site he frequents as well as re-posting all of your shenanigans to Facebook, which. You know.”

 

Dustin sighs melodramatically. “No one understands my artistic process, Chris,” he complains.

 

“Is your Tumblr the work of art, or...?”

 

Dustin’s eyebrows draw together. “My _coding_ is my art, Christopher.” And then he can tell by the look on Chris’ face that Chris is just winding him up, and he flops back in his chair, resigned to being laughed at.

 

“No, you do good work,” Chris says kindly. “Mark knows that or he’d be on your case a lot more often than he is, trust me. If he weren’t happy with the quality and volume of programming you’ve been doing, he would’ve told me.”

 

“Why you?” Dustin demands, throwing up his hands. He always gets into way more theatrics when he’s had to restrain himself for any period of time.

 

“I don’t know. I’m your keeper, I suppose.” Chris smiles wryly. “In any case, I think it’s about time one of us had a chat with him about why he’s being so ridiculously dreadful to everyone.”

 

“Number one, _dreadful_ is an awesome word. Victorian points, bro.” Dustin awards points for nearly everything. Chris is pretty sure that at this point, he, Mark, and Eduardo have points in everything from drinking entire cases of Old Milwaukee in a night (Mark) to having the longest phone conversation in the whole entire world in a language other than English (Eduardo). “Secondly, yes, we are going to march in there right now and tell him that if he makes me cry, it’s the same as making an intern cry, and he has to put five dollars in the Asshole jar.”

 

Chris cocks an eyebrow, amused. “Were there tears this morning and I missed them?”

 

“No,” Dustin replies, dignified. He rises, and makes a vaguely silly flourishy gesture in the general direction of Mark’s office. “However, when I said that we’re going to march into Mark’s office, I meant you’re going to march and I’m going to creep silently in your wake.”

 

Chris anticipates that this will last all of about ten seconds, and he is right. As soon as they are in Mark’s office with the door closed, Dustin crosses to Mark’s desk and folds his arms.

 

Mark finishes the line of code he is typing, and with the air of Hemingway being disturbed whilst amid the climax of a masterpiece, he looks up at Dustin with a vague squint. He registers Chris a beat later, but ignores him.

 

“I’m pretty sure I told you to work,” Mark tells Dustin.

 

“Yep,” Dustin agrees. “In a super mean way, dude, it was not cool. So then Chris came over to gallantly bring me rations amidst my sufferingly long manual labour and we decided that we should come in here and find out why you’re being such a super douche.”

 

“You worked for two hours without taking a break,” Mark points out, sitting back from his laptop with great reluctance. When he does this, it has this terrifying air of a shark turning around to fix its full attention on you. “I call that lunch hour on a Tuesday. And I’m always an asshole. Or so I’m told.”

 

“ _Two_ hours of work can’t be _one_ lunch hour,” Dustin says loftily, and when Mark cocks his head like a predator zeroing in, Chris intervenes.

 

“The point is that we’re concerned,” he says, and Dustin and Mark give him similar looks of surprise and confusion.

 

“Are we?” Dustin asks. Then it dawns on him why Mark would be _more_ of an asshole, because _oh._ Mark and Chris watch these things cross Dustin’s face with totally different interpretations. Mark looks curious and annoyed; Chris is doing the facial expression equivalent of a facepalm. “We are,” Dustin confirms. “We’re most appallingly, unspeakably concerned.”

 

He doesn’t look at Chris, but Chris can tell what he’s thinking like he’s broadcasting it to the world: _Victorian points!_

 

A ripple of confusion passes faintly over Mark’s face at Dustin’s word choice, but he doesn’t comment. “Well, you have nothing to be concerned about,” he says, and Chris can practically _feel_ Mark’s attention pulling away.

 

“I disagree,” Chris says, and he tucks his hands into his pockets and takes a very deliberate step away from Mark’s desk, because he gets the sense that Mark feels cornered.

 

“You’re welcome to your opinion,” Mark says, without heat, acting like he’s turning back to his work but Chris knows better.

 

“Mark, just get it off your chest,” Chris tells him, and that’s apparently what Mark needs because he looks up so lightning-fast that Dustin takes a startled half-step away.

 

“If you want to have him stay at your house like you’re thirteen-year-old girls having an indefinite sleepover, I can’t stop you from doing that.”

 

Dustin glances at Chris, then back at Mark. “He doesn’t really have anywhere else to stay, Mark. And I was kind of a terrible friend during the – the lawsuit and everything so I’m kind of trying to make up for that.”

 

“You were a terrible friend because you chose me over him, you mean,” Mark says, rapid-fire, and Dustin is not equipped to deal with Mark when he’s decided to put the full force of his intellect into destroying someone in a conversation. He gratefully lets Chris take over.

 

“What he’s trying to say is that he’s not having Eduardo stay with him for the express purpose of making you upset,” Chris says patiently.

 

“That’s irrelevant because I’m not upset,” Mark returns.

 

“Mark.” Chris dismisses Mark’s statement with just that one word, just like that.

 

“If I were upset, it wouldn’t matter. It’s your house, you can do what you want with it.” Mark folds his arms and Dustin feels just a little bit sorry for him. Not that that’s a new feeling, what with everything that’s happened in the past few years, but usually it doesn’t come on this strong, and especially not when Mark’s going out of his way to be intolerable.

 

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you,” Dustin bursts out, interrupting whatever Chris had been about to say. He’s pretty sure that’s what Mark wants to hear, after all; Dustin’s not the great reader of feelings or anything like that but he knows that Mark must have heard about Eduardo crashing at his place from someone else. Which, Dustin, has to admit, probably caught him badly by surprise since he hasn’t been allowed to visit Eduardo and as far as he knows, Chris and Dustin haven’t either.

 

 Mark looks at Dustin for a long moment and then nods once, a quick jerk of his head. Dustin’s not sure how to interpret that and, when he exchanges glances with Chris, he can tell that Chris isn’t sure what to do with it, either.

 

After an awkward silence, Dustin says hesitantly, “His sister was pretty insistent about you not being allowed in to see him, but we thought he might need some friends so I kind of wheedled my way in... we had a couple of visits, Mark, that’s all.” His eyes are huge and earnest; it kind of makes Chris’ heart hurt. He tries not to evaluate that too much. “And then his doctors wanted him to stay in the area and there weren’t a lot of options so I said he could stay with me.”

 

Mark’s voice is flat. “Good for you.”

 

Chris says, almost tentatively, “We think it would be best if you didn’t visit him right away. He’s got a long way to go still and you and he have a... a turbulent history, I guess is the best way to word it. So once he’s feeling a little bit better, then maybe the two of you can get together and, you know. Talk it out.”

 

Dustin realizes suddenly that Chris isn’t _afraid_ of Mark; the hesitancy in his voice is because he really, genuinely, is trying to tread with care around Mark’s feelings, which is like – well, Dustin knows that Mark has feelings, but usually they’re sort of buried really, really deep. Like somewhere around Atlantis.

 

“I’m not going to force him to talk about anything,” Mark replies, devoid of expression. “Is the intervention over? I’d like to work now, something you should also consider.”

 

Chris and Dustin leave him to hermit the day away in his office, but Dustin feels curiously guilty all day. He gets twice as much work done as usual. And Mark, as usual, doesn’t comment.


	7. Contact

Eduardo feels better about visits to his psychiatrist now. In the beginning, they were terrifying because he knew what she must think, looking at what rudimentary pieces of his life she could pull together from medical records and the fact that he had _thrown himself off a bridge._

 

Now, he knows Dr. Rosetanni much better and while he doesn’t know for sure what she thought of him initially, he’s reasonably certain that she’s on his side now. It’s not even important to Eduardo so much that she gives him coping strategies and suggestions, even; what he likes best about her is that she listens without giving the appearance of judging, without feeling the need to throw out useless advice. She does, on occasion, tell him in a straightforward way that he should handle this or that situation in a certain way, but the suggestions are always of the kind that Eduardo knows them before she says them. It is just nice to have it confirmed. 

 

He used to get that kind of an audience in a dorm room in Boston, but it’s been a long time since he’s had anyone who actually listens instead of just waiting for their turn to talk.

 

Singapore is kind of a lonely place, he tells her. When he first got there, he was looking for a corner of the planet to set up where Mark, oh destroyer of worlds, couldn’t get to him. Eduardo was not afraid of moving somewhere where he knew no one and didn’t really speak the local language; he is, after all, familiar with the immigrant experience. It’s easier than you think it is, he tells the doctor; you show up and you think that you stick out like a sore thumb, but you don’t, really. No one looks at you twice. Everyone is so absorbed in their own lives that they don’t have time to look every stranger in the eye, trying to spot inconsistencies. And once you have a place to live and a familiar routine – a grocery store you frequent, a bar, a bus route or a well-known car ride to work – everything falls into place and then you aren’t a stranger anymore. You still don’t feel at home on the inside, not really, but no one else can tell but you and after awhile you just tell yourself that the feeling has gone away (even though it hasn’t, and won’t).

 

The doctor asks him if this is how he felt when he came to America. Eduardo says that it is, mostly, but back then it was different too because he came with his parents and they made all of the arrangements. He was young then; kids are pretty adaptable to change. Yeah, he was the new kid at his school and on his block but he picked up English pretty fast and there was an active local synagogue where he made friends, so he got used to Florida reasonably quickly. He does remember how lonely it was at first, because in Brazil they had an enormous, colourful extended family and Florida was devoid of that kind of network of support. Moving to Singapore was a little easier on that front because he was used to doing things on his own at that point.

 

“So why did you feel you had to get away from Mark?” She asks one day, sort of out of the blue, only Eduardo has found that there is an odd, curious thread of consistency to their conversations that he wouldn’t notice if he weren’t looking for it.

 

Eduardo shrugs slightly, restless. He’s doing a little better with the wheelchair lately and, with only a little bit of difficulty, he pushes himself forward and then back again, finding it hard to settle. His good hand does most of the work, but the other wrist is healing pretty well so he can use it to guide the chair if he has to.

 

“It wasn’t right away, or anything,” he points out. “I finished college and then I was kind of aimless for a bit, and then I went to Singapore because my father kept telling me I needed some _direction_ in my life. ‘Find some _direction_ , Eduardo’.” Eduardo rolls the ‘r’ – Ed- _uar_ -do – the way his parents say it. Usually, when he introduces himself, or references his own name, he anglicizes it.

 

“So it was at your father’s direction that you left the country,” the doctor says, like she’s unsure, and it spawns the right reaction.

 

“No,” Eduardo replies. “No, it was his suggestion that I do something with my degree, with my life, but I left the country because of everything that had happened with Facebook. I wanted to invest in the tech industry and everywhere I turned, it was like six degrees of Mark Zuckerberg or Sean Parker or Peter Thiel. I did some homework, and Singapore is one of the best places in the world to do business. So I decided I would go there and see if I could build myself an – existence where I wouldn’t have to go out of my way to avoid that chapter of my life.”

 

The doctor cocks her head. “How do you feel about him now?”

 

Eduardo’s shoulders jerk slightly. He’s looking at the floor, off to his left. “I don’t really know who he is now. I know the guy he was, and that guy literally changed the way I trust people, the way I...” He rotates his good wrist absently, searching for the English word. “... _perceive_ relationships. So I don’t want to put myself in a situation where that can happen again because it was...” He shakes his head and expels a breath. When he looks up at her, his eyes are troubled. “You know.”

 

“I understand he came to visit you in the hospital.” The doctor sounds thoughtful. “That seems out of character, given the way you’ve described him to me in the past.”

 

Eduardo smiles, very faintly. “Yeah. If you knew Mark...” The smile disappears. “He doesn’t really think things through, in terms of whether something will be meaningful or not, so I don’t think he meant it as any kind of... gesture. Maybe I scared him enough that he...” Eduardo doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, so he just leaves it hanging.

 

“That he realized he still cares about you,” the doctor supplies.

 

Eduardo shakes his head. “No, no, that’s not what I... well. Maybe, I don’t...” He rolls his head uneasily on his neck, not really looking at her. “Look, I’m not jaded enough to think that he asked me for the money for Facebook because he thought I’d be easier to cut out of the company later on than the Winklevosses. I know we were friends. I know he thought so too. So it’s not that I think he never cared about me... it’s just that I don’t think that he registered it on any significant level.”

 

“So why did he come to see you?” The doctor presses.

 

“Maybe Chris and Dustin dragged him, maybe he was – curious.” Eduardo is becoming agitated, and he bends his head, buries his forehead in one hand. “I don’t know why he does the things he does. I don’t even want to think about his motivations, it makes me – _tired_.”

 

He says _tired_ like it means so many things; it is simultaneously _sad_ and _angry_ and _confused_ and _disappointed._ Dr. Rosetanni backs away from the subject and leaves it alone for now. They come back to it often, but Eduardo has never been good at handling this thing with Mark and he doesn’t really get better.

 

\--

 

Chris is in New York again and Dustin abruptly doesn’t have anyone else to call. It’s why he’s frantically throwing clothes into a suitcase, helter-skelter, with his phone cradled between shoulder and ear, the line ringing emptily on and on while he mutters, “Come on, Mark, come _on_ , _come on_.”

 

There is no answer on the other end. Swearing – and then remembering that he isn’t alone in the house anymore and lowering his voice for the litany of similar words that follow – Dustin hits redial as he tosses a toothbrush, shampoo, and a razor in with the mismatched mess of clothing.

 

Eventually, Mark picks up. He doesn’t sound like he’s been sleeping, which is singularly unsurprising because Mark keeps ridiculous hours. Dustin likes to spread the word around to the interns that Mark never sleeps. He thinks it’s funny to leave them with the impression that Mark is watching their every move, all the time, like some kind of irritable, unwavering, vengeful god. Tonight, he is grimly glad that this means that Mark is awake to take his call, despite how long it took for Mark to unglue himself to his computer and acknowledge his ringing phone.

 

“It’s the middle of the night.”

 

“Like you care. Listen, I need you to come over.”

 

Mark pauses, startled. “What?”

 

“My mom called, my dad’s in the hospital. It was a... heart attack, or something, I don’t know, she was kind of hysterical. But I have to fly home and the next flight out is in an hour and a half.”

 

Mark, to his credit, sounds at least a little bit concerned. “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

 

Dustin fervently wishes he were on the phone with Chris right now. Chris would know what to say. But Dustin’s not going to call him at one a.m. local time, hours later New York time, because last time Chris was _with_ someone. So Dustin sighs and says, “I don’t know, Mark. But I need you to come over. Someone needs to be in the house.” _With Eduardo_ , he doesn’t say, but obviously Mark knows.

 

“I thought you hired a nurse.” Mark knows this because Dustin had, in a fit of guilt, broken down and told him everything after the tense discussion between the two of them and Chris in Mark’s office.

 

“We did, but it’s part of Eduardo’s progress, she doesn’t stay the night anymore. So she won’t be in until eight.” Dustin is frustrated at having to explain all of this to Mark, because he wouldn’t have to explain it to Chris. Chris would just come, no questions asked.

 

“So you need me to stay there tonight,” Mark says, and Dustin could throttle him.

 

“ _Yes._ And maybe for the next few nights, I don’t know when I’ll back. And Chris won’t be back from New York until Wednesday.”

 

Mark makes some kind of noise that sounds like a distant rattle on the other end of the line. After half a moment of dead silence, he says, “I’m coming” and hangs up.

 

Dustin is practically jittering out of his skin by the time Mark shows up, even though it really didn’t take him long to arrive. Predictably, he hasn’t brought a thing with him in regards to an overnight bag; he just has his laptop tucked under one arm, charger in tow. Dustin, mindful of Eduardo sleeping on the main floor, gives Mark a series of rushed, hissed instructions before he hurries out the door. Mark only has to keep an eye on Eduardo for seven hours, he tells himself; then Marisa will come and everything will be okay.

 

_Seven hours, Mark,_ he thinks, as he backs out of the driveway and speeds away down the quiet street. _Don’t screw it up._

 

He does feel more than a little guilty for how Eduardo will react when he wakes up and realizes that he and Mark have been sleeping under the same roof.

 

\--

 

Eduardo wakes up around seven. He’s been tired pretty much since The Fall (he won’t even get into the months preceding that) so he goes to bed early, which means that he’s always up when the day is still quiet. He lies in bed for a few long, hushed moments, listening to the world wake up outside. It seems incongruous, somehow, that in Dustin’s large, airy house there would be no birds to listen to outside the window, but then, Eduardo supposes that the subdivision is fairly new and there aren’t really any trees. So the sounds of the morning are mostly a dim roar of traffic from far away, and the odd sound of a car starting and pulling away on Dustin’s block. Somewhere, in the distance, a lawn mower starts.

 

The only problem with being up this early is that the nurse doesn’t come for an hour or so yet and Eduardo, despite being able to maneuver himself around the house fairly well at this point, is still in the very vulnerable position of not being able to get out of bed by himself. Normally he doesn’t mind – he’ll read; he’s got a stack of newspapers and copies of Time and Newsweek next to the bed – but some mornings he needs to get up really urgently, for one very obvious reason.

 

He always tries to hold it, because seriously, he’s already putting Dustin out enough by staying in his house and being a nuisance, and he doesn’t want to annoy Dustin by waking him up at the crack of dawn for the awkward, uncomfortable task of taking Eduardo to the bathroom. Once or twice, he’s had to give in and text Dustin (because he’s not going to yell for him, come on now, this situation is embarrassing _enough_ without vocalizing it like that) and Dustin is always sleepy but amiable, making cheerful conversation to minimize the awkward. Eduardo appreciates that, even while it makes him wince that this is an experience he has to share with someone he’s only recently allowed back into his life, and someone to whom he already owes a sizeable debt for taking him in.

 

This morning is one of those mornings, and as the clock creeps toward seven-thirty, Eduardo is increasingly distracted from the article he’s reading about – of all things – depleted uranium and birth defects in the Middle East. Eventually, resigned, he texts Dustin.

 

Unbeknownst to Eduardo, Dustin, in Florida, forwards the text to Mark.

 

So when the door opens a handful of minutes later, Eduardo looks up, expecting Dustin. Mark doesn’t miss the way something behind Eduardo’s eyes gives a shudder and closes over when he realizes who has come instead, and the best way to describe the expression on his face is shock mixed with horror (the latter of which Mark is surprised he finds sort of offensive. He’s not a _monster_ , for Christ’s sake).

 

“Where’s Dustin?” Eduardo asks, as Mark shuffles across the room and shifts Eduardo’s wheelchair closer to the bed.

 

“Family emergency,” Mark replies, clipped. “His dad’s in the hospital. Chris is in New York. He had to call me.”

 

Eduardo realizes faintly that Mark is almost apologizing, and he’s not sure how he feels about that because most of what he’s feeling is too much ugly surprise and embarrassment to really register a lot of anything else.

 

“You don’t have to – I mean, it’s okay. I can just wait for the nurse.” Eduardo is watching Mark study him, trying to figure out how Dustin and Marisa do this without hurting him.

 

“No, you can’t,” Mark says. He slides his fingers under Eduardo’s uninjured ankle, and his hands are warmer than Eduardo had been expecting.

 

“How do you know?” Eduardo demands, sort of panicking.

 

 “How do I know? Because _oh, right_ , I _know_ you. _Relax._ ” Mark settles a hand against Eduardo’s chest, looking him dead in the eye with consternation. “You wouldn’t have texted if you could have waited. So stop fighting me and let me do this.”

 

Eduardo realizes that his whole body has gone rigid, and with Mark’s words some of the tension flows out of him and he expels a breath. “Okay. Just. Be careful.”

 

Mark gives Eduardo a look, like, _what do you think I’m doing_ , but he manages to get Eduardo into the chair without more than a minor ache or twinge here and there. For a first timer, he’s done a fair job, and Eduardo wonders fleetingly what Doctor Rosetanni would read into Mark’s focused gaze, and the gentle but vaguely distant way he handles the broken parts of Eduardo.

 

Mark, for his part, wants to finish this before his brain can get involved. If he focuses on the task at hand, the immediacy of placing hand here, moving knee there, he can _just_ do it. He’s always been good at tunnel vision and it’s serving him well now. He has no idea what he would think about if he let himself dissect this, but there’s a brush of heat at the edge of his mind and he thinks firmly, _No_ , and pushes it well away.

 

When Eduardo’s in the chair, he wheels himself away and down the hall. The door to the bathroom shuts with a _bang_ that sounds probably louder than it is in the otherwise quiet house. Mark hears him hesitate, and then lock the door. He gathers that Dustin and the nurse have jury-rigged a system that allows Eduardo to do the whole bathroom situation without needing immediate assistance, something for which Mark – and Eduardo, he expects – will be forever grateful.

 

When Eduardo emerges, he is still red-faced, but he can look Mark in the eye.

 

“Thanks,” he says, and to his credit, his voice sounds fairly level. He’s trying to be an adult about this, and Mark has an insane urge to make it hard for him.

 

“Sorry I’m not Dustin.”

 

Eduardo’s eyes immediately skitter away. “Yeah. I was just surprised, is all.”

 

“He’ll be back soon.” _And then you won’t have to deal with me_ , comes the silent follow-up to that sentence, so obvious and awkward in the pause that Eduardo can practically hear it like Mark said it aloud.

 

“That’s good.” Eduardo wonders when he forgot how to talk to Mark; how to deal with the little stab in the things he says, whether he means them or not, and how to fill the little silences that Mark doesn’t even seem to find uncomfortable.

 

“Yes.” Mark turns abruptly and walks off down the hall. Eduardo follows, albeit much more slowly, and by the time he reaches the living room, Mark is already sitting on the couch, laptop open on his knees. Eduardo can tell by the rumple of the blanket on the back of the couch and the way Mark perfectly fits into the hollow in the cushions that he’s been there all night.

 

“Didn’t you sleep?” He asks, unnecessarily. He’s not sure why he asks except that small talk is the only thing that feels safe.

 

“Yes.” Mark rolls his shoulders. “For a couple of hours.”

 

Eduardo nods, his gaze trailing away to the window, the floor, anywhere but Mark’s face. He wants to ask Mark why he doesn’t just grow up, that this by-passing sleep thing is so freshman year, but he is afraid of bringing up the past so he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he slowly wheels himself into the kitchen.

 

He doesn’t realize that Mark is following until he hears the scuffle of Mark’s shoes on the tile behind him.

 

“Do you need help?” Mark asks, his voice devoid of much expression, as usual.

 

“No, it’s okay.” Well, that’s not entirely true; usually Dustin makes breakfast because he can reach the stove and everything and a two-handed cook is better than a one-handed one, but Eduardo can reach the fridge and he is totally okay with having fruit and a glass of milk for breakfast to preserve his dignity.

 

“I can... cook something,” Mark says, sounding almost unsure, and Eduardo very suddenly wants to laugh. He doesn’t, though, he just shakes his head.

 

“It’s okay, Mark. Really. Go back to your... your work. I can do most things by myself.”

 

Mark looks belligerent for a moment, like he’s considering refusing, but eventually he does as he’s told. Eduardo listens to his footsteps recede into the living room before he retrieves himself a cold breakfast.

 

\--

 

It is later in the day before Eduardo finds himself in Awkward Situation Number Two. It’s Sunday, so Mark is sort of uncomfortably _there_ the whole time, like he has nothing better to do. Marisa has come by and made Mark’s acquaintance, and she makes hilarious facial expressions that mock Mark just a little bit whenever his back is turned. Like everyone else, she finds Mark stiff and disengaging, and she chatters at Eduardo in Portuguese with droll comments about what people are going to do when they find out that Facebook’s CEO is a robot sent back in time to destroy mankind by turning everyone into drooling, social media-addicted idiots. It makes Eduardo smile despite himself, so that when she does leave, he feels just a little bit better about how the day’s going. In the afternoon, Mark takes Eduardo to his physiotherapy appointment and then they eat dinner separately, Eduardo in the kitchen and Mark in the living room.

 

It is around then that Eduardo comes aware of how small the main floor of the house has become. He can’t really hang around in the kitchen; there’s nothing to do, and anyway, Dustin’s not much of a cook so it’s not like it’s a cozy, lived-in space. He would feel incredibly strange shutting himself into his own bedroom, almost like he is ceding territory to Mark, and the only other area that isn’t hallway or foyer is the living room, where Mark is currently typing away, intent.

 

Eduardo supposes he could ask Mark to go and work upstairs, only that would be a little bit ridiculous because they are two grown men and they should be able to exist in the same space without acting like teenage girls.

 

Eventually, Eduardo decides that he is just going to deal with it and wheels himself into the living room. Mark is sitting where he’s been basically all day, and Eduardo thinks, _there is absolutely no reason why we can’t both be in here without it being weird._

 

It turns out that he is wrong. He wheels himself next to the couch and sort of hovers, awkwardly, for a moment, before Mark glances up, uncomprehending.

 

“Do you need something?”

 

Eduardo ducks his head, suddenly embarrassed. “No. It’s just...” He gestures helplessly. “There’s really nowhere else to spend time. I’m sort of limited to the main floor.”

 

“Oh.” Mark glances around. “Do you want to watch TV?”

 

“Don’t worry about it,” Eduardo tells him, reaching for the remote. “You can keep doing what you’re doing, it takes a car bomb to get your attention once you get started.”

 

Mark gives him an odd look and Eduardo realizes that he’s made a comment like the last couple of years never happened. It is overly familiar, and at once, Eduardo is embarrassed. He refuses to admit to it, though, so he simply flicks on the TV and idly channel surfs.

 

At some point, as the hour grows later, Eduardo becomes accustomed to Mark sitting beside him. They aren’t speaking (Mark’s too focused for that) but the sound of Mark’s typing and the way he breathes is _achingly_ simple and acutely recognizable from their Harvard days. It lulls Eduardo into dim, only semi-conscious sense of security, and as it grows dark outside, he starts to doze.

 

He stirs when he hears Mark speaking, the drone of his voice identifiable if not the actual words that he’s saying.

 

“What?” He says, rubbing a hand across his eyes in an attempt to come back from the grogginess a little bit faster.

 

“I said I think this movie is ridiculous.” Mark has actually looked up from his computer to take in what’s happening on the TV screen. Eduardo recognizes the film after a moment; it’s _Say Anything_ , because John Cusack is about ten minutes from holding a boom box over his head outside of Ione Skye’s window.

 

“Why do you think it’s ridiculous?” Eduardo asks, partially because he knows Mark wants to pontificate – he can always tell – and partially because he’s still trying to chase the fog out of his brain and the question gives him time.

 

Mark launches into a diatribe about how _tired_ the clichés and movie tropes of the eighties were by the time this movie came out, and how irritating John Cusack’s voice is, and how ridiculous it is to just show up outside of someone’s house with a boom box when it would be way more practical to just go inside and talk to the girl like a rational person.

 

“It’s romantic,” Eduardo says, smiling a little.

 

Mark doesn’t recognize that he’s trolling because he frowns and replies, “As far as I can tell, _romance_ is essentially stupid people going out of their way to look stupid in front of someone they want to jump.”

 

“Someone they want to _jump_?” Eduardo asks, amused.

 

“Yeah.” Mark’s head cocks slightly, like he’s unclear on Eduardo’s question. Eduardo chooses not to clarify it, although he thinks it’s typical of Mark to choose _jump_ over _make love to_ or anything remotely, well, _romantic._

 

“Anyway, you don’t like it anymore than I do, you were out cold for the last half hour,” Mark informs him, with a hint of smugness.

 

Eduardo doesn’t even deny it. “Yeah. I get tired faster now.”

 

Mark doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that – he has been steering well clear of talking about The Fall since that initial night in the hospital when Eduardo had denied it was a suicide attempt – so they lapse into silence again.

 

Eduardo realizes afterward that it’s the first normal conversation they’ve had since before the lawsuit.

 

He dozes off again once the movie ends, and this time he finds himself in the middle of a vivid dream. He’s in Singapore, in his condo, but it’s darker in there than it usually is, despite the broad windows overlooking the city. He’s in his bedroom, and it looks faintly lighter outside in the hallway, so he follows the growing light down into the kitchen, and then the living room. Outside the enormous picture windows, the sun is coming up. In the distance there is a dull throbbing, and Eduardo realizes after a long moment that it’s the sound of a helicopter, far away but growing closer. Perplexed, he approaches the window and looks out.

 

The helicopter travels across the city skyline, and Eduardo knows that it’s coming for him, although he doesn’t know how he knows. He watches it approach, and it is with a sense of profound confusion that he sees the side of the helicopter open and a figure shimmy down on a rope.

 

At this point, the helicopter is close enough that Eduardo recognizes the climber as Mark. He is swinging thirty, forty stories above the pavement, but he doesn’t seem afraid, and for some reason, neither is Eduardo. There is also no part of him that recognizes how patently ridiculous this is; he feels totally calm, like he regularly receives helicopter visits from people he’s sued.

 

Somehow, without letting go of the rope, Mark takes out a ghetto blaster and cranks up the music. Unsurprisingly, the song is totally incongruous with the rest of the dream – they’re apparently acting out the billionaire version of the scene from _Say Anything_ , but the song is Afroman’s _Because I Got High_.

 

“This is ridiculous,” Mark shouts. “Look at us. Who uses CD players anymore?”

 

Eduardo wakes up suddenly into the dark of the living room in Dustin’s house in Palo Alto.

 

Shifting in his chair, he stretches lazily and looks for Mark. To his surprise, Mark is passed out on the couch, his head tilted back and his mouth tipped open. It makes Eduardo snort.

 

_Who uses CD players anymore?_

 

Eduardo is pretty sure that the actual most absurd part of that dream was the part where Mark made a dramatic, romantic gesture.

 

He remembers at Harvard, coming home from a get-together for the Investors Association, checking his e-mail, and seeing the notification that Mark had updated his blog. Eduardo had already been in his pajamas by then, but he had wearily tugged his suit back on and made the trek across campus to see if Mark was all right after the break-up with Erica.

 

_“I need you.”_

_“I’m here.”_

_“No – I need the algorithm you use to rank chess players.”_

 

Mark hadn’t been okay after all, but he had never wanted the kind of reassurance that Eduardo had wanted to offer, and Eduardo, feeling rebuffed, had just let it go. He sort of recognizes that now, that just because Mark acts okay doesn’t mean he is, but he also doesn’t think it’s fair that he has to accept Mark acting like a jerk just because Mark isn’t good at sharing his feelings.

 

Mark’s sleeping now, though, with his mouth wide open, maybe even snoring softly, and Eduardo lets himself drift off again too, feeling comfortable and warm and not wanting to bother with the trouble and awkwardness of waking Mark up to help him into bed.


	8. Damage

Dustin comes back into town the day before Chris does, and he seems exhausted and sad but relieved that Mark and Eduardo have not bludgeoned, murdered, or otherwise assaulted one another. Mark, for his part, feels a stirring of kinship with Eduardo as they watch Dustin drag his things upstairs, his shoulders sagging. They’ve held down the fort while Dustin has been gone, and now they’re the witnesses to his anxiety, which he has already made clear that he steadfastly does not want to talk about.

 

Eduardo, though, feels like less of an outsider to how Dustin feels. After all, Dustin’s dad’s health is failing and Eduardo certainly has experience there. Of course, his own father died all at once, but he is certain that the end result, the net _feeling_ , is not dissimilar. So when Mark slips away, back to his own house, Eduardo turns on all the lights on the main floor to chase away the shadows and waits for Dustin to come back downstairs.

 

“How’s it going, man?” Eduardo asks him, as Dustin trudges into the room and flops onto the couch.

 

“Not awesome,” Dustin replies, staring at the ceiling. He can’t even seem to muster the energy to sound properly standoffish so that Eduardo will leave him alone.

 

“How are your folks dealing?”

 

Dustin shakes his head slightly. “My mom’s not. She’s in pieces. My sister’s trying to hold things together but she’s starting to get kind of crackly too.”

 

Eduardo thinks that Mark would be okay with it if Dustin had wanted to take time off work to stay with his folks and offer his support, but somehow he gets the impression that Dustin is happier here, far away from the nucleus of anxiety and grief that is tearing at his family. Dustin is not the guy who holds it together in a time of crisis. He is so rarely sad or upset that when he is, he’s not sure how to handle it, and he is certainly not accustomed to carrying other peoples’ burdens of grief around with him.

 

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Eduardo says honestly.

 

“I know.” Dustin glances Eduardo’s way. “I guess you weren’t really tight with your dad.”

 

“I don’t know if I’d put it like that,” Eduardo replies thoughtfully, surprising himself a little with the sudden rush of feeling for the old man. “He pushed me really hard and we fought a lot but in some ways I think I knew him better than I know a lot of other people. He didn’t hide anything from me; I knew all the awful parts of him and he knew all the awful parts of me and arguing was how we talked to each other.”

 

Eduardo realizes that he’s never quite put that into words before. Maybe Dustin’s better at this than Doctor Rosetanni, he thinks wryly.

 

“Hmm.” Dustin gives the air of considering this, but Eduardo can tell that his thoughts are closer to his own family than Eduardo’s. “My dad is – like, we’re pretty close. He used to coach my soccer team and take me for ice cream at tournaments and stuff. And he was the one who thought I should go to Harvard instead of staying closer to home, and if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be working for Facebook and I wouldn’t know any of you guys.”

 

“He sounds like an amazing dad,” Eduardo says, genuinely. “You’re lucky to have him, D-Man. And he’s lucky to have you.”

 

Something glistens on the edge of Dustin’s eyelashes, but his head is still tilted back, resting against the couch, so the tear doesn’t fall.

 

“I’m gonna miss him a lot,” Dustin says quietly.

 

“Yeah.” Eduardo reaches over, as inelegantly as that can happen with the way he’s trapped in this chair, and squeezes Dustin’s shoulder. “All you can do is get up every day and get through it. Eventually, it gets easier. I promise.”

 

Dustin looks suddenly at Eduardo, like it’s occurred to him that Ricardo Saverin’s death and The Fall had occurred less than two weeks from one another, and abruptly he looks terrified, like he just _knows_ that he’s about to be swallowed by something insurmountable.

 

“Don’t do it my way,” Eduardo says quietly. “Ask for help.”

 

“I...” Dustin’s voice cracks, and he clears his throat and tries again. “I don’t know how.”

 

“The hardest part is admitting that you have to,” Eduardo says firmly, because he knows that part better than he knows anything. “After that, all it takes is someone who wants to answer. You’ve got Chris. And me. And even Mark. He’s your friend, even if he’s bad at it sometimes.”

 

“I just don’t wanna drown.” Dustin wipes the back of his hand across his watery eyes. He huffs out an agonized laugh. “Jeez, look at me, huh?”

 

“No one’s going to let you drown,” Eduardo reassures him. “Hey, trust me. You’re not in a huge, sad, empty condo in a foreign city with about eight metric tonnes of emotional baggage and without any close friends. What happened to me isn’t going to happen to you.”

 

Dustin is silent for a moment, composing himself. After awhile, he says, almost hesitantly, “The first night we came to the hospital, you said it wasn’t a suicide attempt.”

 

Eduardo’s reaction is almost delayed; it takes him a few seconds to look away, and when he does, his expression is dark and difficult to read.

 

“I came to San Francisco for the shareholders meeting,” he says finally, after Dustin has begun to consider apologizing for the statement, which seems careless and insensitive in retrospect. “I really did. There was no moment when I thought, San Francisco is – the suicide capital of the world. I should try to end it there.”

 

Dustin shifts closer to the end of the couch where Eduardo is sitting. He reaches out, closing the distance between them and laying a hand on Eduardo’s arm, the one that is still bandaged. “Why did you go to the bridge?”

 

Eduardo knows that Dustin needs the answer to this question because he is trying to predict his own actions and reactions in the days to come, when his own father dies and his world spins out of control. But Eduardo doesn’t have anything clear-cut for him, and for some reason it fills him with guilt. He wishes he didn’t have to be the one to talk to Dustin about this, only because he wishes that none of this had happened the way it has.

 

“I don’t know.” Eduardo shrugs helplessly. “I was driving and when I parked, I was close enough to walk. And I’d never been, so I thought I’d go up and look. I got to the railing and people were just... walking by. No one tried to stop me. It was so surreal. And after that...” Eduardo presses his lips together for a moment, struggling with it. “I actually don’t remember.”

 

He looks up at Dustin, and there’s something terrible about not remembering that makes him afraid. Dustin, alarmed, gives his arm a gentle squeeze. Eduardo presses on, inexplicably wanting to finish the tale. “Some of the witness statements said that I kind of just tipped over. And then I pinwheeled for – I don’t know how long it even takes to fall that far. Four seconds? Five? And I guess I hit the water at the right angle... you know they say you have to hit feet first, at the exact right angle, if you’re going to survive? After that I think I was trying to swim and someone pulled me into a boat.”

 

He scrubs his hand across his face, feeling hot. “It was so stupid. Honestly, Dustin. If I’d ever had a moment where I’d sat down and thought, _okay, suicide_ , I would’ve gone to the pharmacy, bought a bottle of Aspirin, downed it all, and gone to bed. It would have been so much _easier_. So that’s why I don’t understand how it could be a suicide attempt. I can’t conceive of myself ever thinking that throwing myself off a bridge would be – you know, fitting. Or whatever it is people think when they jump off of bridges. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

 

Dustin nods, and he doesn’t seem to know what to say. That’s all right, because Eduardo wasn’t really expecting him to.

 

“Well, I’m glad you’re still here,” Dustin says at last, and Eduardo gives him a tired smile.

 

“You’re going to be okay, D-Man. I know you will.”

 

\--

 

Chris goes to see Dustin first when he gets back into town. He’s heard about the whole disaster by now, and he lets himself into Dustin’s house on Wednesday night without preamble.

 

“Dustin?” He calls. “D-Man?”

 

“In here.” Dustin sounds weary, and Chris finds him in the kitchen, filling a giant mixing bowl with four or five different kinds of obscenely sugary cereal.

 

“I don’t get Lucky Charms,” Dustin informs him. “You have to eat around all those bread-y obstacles to get to the marshmallows. It’s super frustrating.”

 

“Bring it in,” Chris says, and the moment he reaches out and catches Dustin by the shoulder, Dustin curls into him like he’s the only life preserver there is and everything else is the North Atlantic.

 

“How’re you doing?” Chris murmurs.

 

Dustin makes a noise that doesn’t even mean anything and buries his face in Chris’ shirt. Chris lets Dustin make a solid attempt to crush his ribs for a minute or two before he gently pulls away just enough to look Dustin in the face.

 

“How’s your dad?”

 

Dustin looks deeply unhappy. “I don’t know. Not good. He’s still in the hospital. His heart’s going.”

 

“Are you sure you’d rather be here?” Chris asks him seriously. “I know you don’t want to be there while your mom and your sister are having a meltdown. But I’m worried that you’re going to regret it later if you aren’t there with him.”

 

Dustin shakes his head furiously. “No. I can’t go back there. Everything’s falling apart and everyone thinks that I should be the one who, like, Supermans his way through and just fixes everything.”

 

“No one thinks that,” Chris tells him.

 

“They _all_ think that,” Dustin insists, and he won’t be persuaded otherwise. “The pressure is unbelievable, Chris. I had to get out of there.”

 

Chris gives him a searching look. “What if I went with you?”

 

Dustin looks briefly startled, then frowns. “You don’t have to do that. It’s going to be a mess, I can’t drag you into that.”

 

“I _want_ you to drag me into that,” Chris says firmly. “I’m good at this stuff. Right? I want you to be there for your dad and I want to help.”

 

“What about the campaign?” Dustin asks him. “And Facebook stuff?”

 

“I have a whole team to do campaign work,” Chris explains. “And Facebook stuff will still be here when we get back, providing Mark doesn’t do anything colossally stupid while we’re gone.”

 

“I don’t know if we can count on that,” Dustin says, just a little shakily, but they both smile because they’re grateful for the joke.

 

“So,” Chris says briskly, “I’ll talk to Mark. He’ll have to come and stay with Eduardo again, but it didn’t seem to be a problem the last time so hopefully it’ll be okay. You just worry about packing a bag. A coherent bag.”

 

“I always pack a coherent bag,” Dustin says innocently.

 

Chris almost snorts. “Eight pairs of pajama pants, no underwear. Speaks for itself.”

 

“That was _one time_ ,” Dustin protests.

 

“Just saying,” Chris says, raising his hands. “And try to eat some real food.”

 

“Lucky Charms are real food,” Dustin insists, turning the box around like he’s looking for the nutritional information so he can wave it in Chris’ face.

 

“Lucky Charms are _not_ real food. We’re going to eat nothing but giant Florida oranges when we get to your parents’ house if you don’t eat something today that’ll prevent you from getting scurvy.”

 

Dustin considers this. “Will you peel them for me?”

 

“Do not test me,” Chris warns.

 

So at some point, Dustin drinks a glass of apple juice and makes a half-hearted attempt to look for the wilted celery that he’s pretty sure existed in the fridge at some point. He figures that’ll do him for about a week.

 

As Dustin packs, Chris makes a trip by the office to visit Mark. He explains the state of affairs, and Mark seems, as usual, largely unaffected. He agrees to stay at Dustin’s again, and the fact that he says it readily prompts Chris to ask, warily:

 

“How’d it go, these last few days?”

 

Mark gives a one-shouldered shrug, more of a twitch than anything. “It was tolerable.”

 

Chris nods. “Yeah? Good. Did you guys get along, more or less?”

 

Mark looks up at him, like he’s not sure where Chris is going with this. “No one killed anyone else, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re adults, Chris. We put up with each other.”

 

“I know, I know,” Chris says, because he _does_ know; they are well past the point of needing to babysit Mark and Eduardo. Either the two of them will get their shit together or they won’t, but Dustin and Chris have largely grown past feeling caught in the middle, or somehow personally responsible for trying to parent trap the two of them into liking one another again.

 

“I’m not going to be twenty-five years old and still slamming doors and throwing things,” Mark says firmly, which Chris is just going to go ahead and assume is metaphorical for Mark and literal for Eduardo, since the former has a tendency to get cuttingly mean when he’s angry while the latter can’t help violent, showy displays of rage. Chris knows for a fact that the kind of vicious physical aggression displayed during the laptop smash was not the first of its kind. And it’s not that Eduardo would ever hit anyone either, least of all someone he cares about (least of all Mark) but his anger is passionate and he doesn’t control it.

 

“Do you think it’ll ever go beyond that?” Chris asks carefully. It’s not that he wants to push this, but seriously, _Mark and Eduardo_. Maybe there’s no such thing as Meant To Be and the two of them will go their separate ways again once Eduardo is well, and Chris doesn’t even know, it could be that that would be for the best. Sometimes life doesn’t happen the way you think it will, and sometimes even an unexpected outcome, an _unhoped-for_ outcome, is still acceptable if the parties involved come out unscathed.

 

But Chris holds an almost unshakable belief that the two of them need to fix things between them before they can even think of moving on with their lives and being with other people. And he’s pretty sure that once they fix things, they won’t want to be with other people after all. They’re both too fucked up in ways that make them an awkwardly precise fit for each other.

 

Mark fixes him with an inscrutable look for a long moment. Chris lets him take his time, not thrown by the thousand-yard Zuckerberg stare that sends the interns into paroxysms of fear. Chris, after all, knew Mark in the age of _Zuckonit_ and repetitive conversations about why it always had to be Chris buying toilet paper and Aspirin for everyone.

 

“I know we have to have the discussion,” Mark allows at last. “Based on previous experience, that conversation seems likely to fail, but Eduardo never behaves in a way that lets me calculate a probability for the future with any degree of certainty so I don’t know. I do know that both of us believe we are right.”

 

“Yeah.” Chris rolls his shoulders wearily, suddenly tired; suddenly aware of the thousands of things he has to do before he and Dustin can leave. “I was afraid of that.”

 

Seriously, this whole Mark-and-Eduardo thing is exhausting. Chris doesn’t even know how they go through it themselves. It seems like a long, dark tunnel full of the same crap all the time and no matter how far they go, the light never appears at the other end.

 

“We’ll talk about this more when I get back,” Chris promises him. “In the meantime, try not to burn any more bridges with Eduardo, okay?”

 

Mark gets a faintly annoyed edge in his tone. “Did you tell Wardo not to burn any more bridges with me?”

 

“No, I did not, but he’s got more broken bones than you so he gets a pass,” Chris says lightly. “Be _good_ , Mark. Please.”

 

Chris turns around again when he reaches the office door and finds Mark watching him go, his eyebrows furrowed slightly.

 

“Please,” Chris repeats.

 

“I don’t know what you think I’m going to – ” Mark begins.

 

Chris cuts in. “Be a team player for the next few days. For me, at least. If he hits you with a chair, I’m going to have to come back from Florida to deal with the press and that’s going to be unfortunate for me.”

 

“I think it would be more unfortunate for me, as I’d be the one who had been hit by the chair,” Mark says, because he likes the last word.

 

“Doubly unfortunate, because I’d hit you with the chair a second time for making me come back from Florida, and then I’d hit Wardo with it for similar reasons, and then I’d have to write yet another press release. You see how this spirals?”

 

Mark bites his lip. “Well, if I see any signs of impending chair violence, I will race to get out of harm’s way just for you.”

 

“How about you try not to antagonize him to begin with?” Chris suggests.

 

He leaves Mark with a befuddled frown, as though Chris has suggested he close his eyes and wish for fairies that will fly in and save his and Eduardo’s relationship.

 

\--

 

Like the last time he was here, Mark sets up in Dustin’s living room, laptop on his knees. The day and a half that has passed since the last time he stayed here has had an odd kind of effect on the sort of careful civility he and Eduardo had been cultivating. Now Eduardo rolls past the living room door every now and again, but he never looks inside or addresses Mark.

 

It is as though, reflects Mark, they have reached the furthest limit they can go without rehashing everything that happened. It is like a barrier that stands between them and a re-buildable relationship. Neither of them will broach it, paradoxically afraid of destroying the cautious peace they have created in lieu of an actual friendship.

 

The hour grows later, and Mark wonders what Eduardo is doing. He knows that Eduardo reads a lot, especially since the accident, but the house has been quiet for so long that Mark begins to feel restless. He wouldn’t say he’s worried, exactly, but he gets up to go in search of Eduardo anyway. He might as well ask if Eduardo wants to order something they both like for dinner.

 

Eduardo is not in his room. The bed is neatly made, and everything is put away in the drawers and the closet. It is almost as though no one lives here, except for the small stack of magazines and paperbacks on the night stand, and an elegant case for a pair of reading glasses that sends a ripple of something unpleasant through Mark’s belly.

 

He analyzes the feeling only for a second. He has seen the reading glasses before, of course; Eduardo reads all the time, and it’s unavoidable. But this is the first time Mark’s really _thought_ about the implications. Either the fact that Eduardo has acquired reading glasses since the last time they were on speaking terms means that literally anything could have changed about Eduardo, that Mark doesn’t know him at all... or it could be that Mark’s reacting to the glasses themselves, because he and Eduardo aren’t getting any younger and the enmity they carry around for each other is so much _baggage_ , such a colossal _waste of time_.

 

Mark cannot say why it’s a waste of time. He doesn’t know what they should be doing with their time instead. But it feels like he’s identified one of the things that nag at him about the glasses, and almost on a compulsion, he crosses the room and opens the case. He’s not sure why he’s disappointed when it turns out to be empty. He picks it up anyway, stowing it in his pocket, and he walks back out of the room without considering why he did it beyond spitefulness at Eduardo for changing when Mark didn’t say that he could.

 

Mark makes his way further down the hall, checking the bathroom (dark) and the kitchen (empty). Growing slightly alarmed – Mark knows very well, after all, that one of the reasons why he has to stay here is that Eduardo is on _suicide watch_ , which means that someone must _watch_ him and know of his whereabouts at all times – Mark turns in one place in the kitchen, looking for clues.

 

On his second sweep, he spies the way the patio door leading out into the yard has not quite been pulled all the way to. Not sure why the sight of that makes his gut twist in anxiety instead of relief that he’s got a trail on Eduardo, Mark goes out onto the patio.

 

Eduardo is not here either. But suddenly, Mark hears an odd kind of wheezing, like someone trying to draw breath when their lungs are really struggling not to waste air on noises that express how much agony they’re in.

 

Mark takes three or four steps across the patio to the stairs – just five of them – leading down into the yard.

 

In the oncoming dark, it is initially difficult to see anything. But as Mark becomes aware of the shadow-shape of Eduardo’s wheelchair, overturned next to the steps, and then tracks from there to the dark shape of someone lying in the grass, his heart drops into his stomach and Mark is suddenly afraid to go down the stairs and see what has happened.

 

“Wardo?” He says, and there is a note of – uncertainty in his voice, like he wants someone to reassure him that everything is fine, actually, and that this cloying, nightmarish panic is all a misunderstanding.

 

The sound of the wheezing quickens and then stutters. Eduardo doesn’t say anything in response, but Mark can tell that he heard him. And Mark has never asked Eduardo a question that he hasn’t gotten an answer to, hasn’t gotten a _yes_ to, in fact, so he knows that if Eduardo is leaving him hanging, something is _not okay._

 

As though the spell on him is broken, Mark flies down the stairs to kneel in the grass next to Eduardo. “Wardo,” he mutters, almost helplessly, knowing that you shouldn’t move someone with a back injury, knowing a million things from long-ago first aid courses that don’t tell you what you should do when someone you care about is sprawled in the grass like someone shot him out of the sky.

 

“H... w...” Eduardo can’t wrap his mouth around whatever he is trying to say, can’t quite draw in the requisite air, and Mark can see how twisted he’d managed to become in the fall. Eduardo feebly lifts one arm, and Mark realizes with a start that his fingers are bloody. Stupidly, blindly, Mark reaches out to touch the grass under Eduardo’s hands and, when a sharp sting bites into his fingers, he realizes that the grass there is full of broken glass. Mark can’t tell how much; it’s too dark for that. He has no idea where it came from.

 

Mark sits back, feeling suddenly ill, and reaches into his pockets, fumbling for his phone. His fingers are sticky with blood and the way his hands are shaking means it takes an infuriating thirty seconds to drag the thing out of his shorts and dial emergency services.

 

Mark doesn’t remember the conversation that follows very clearly, but he knows he was oddly bland about the way he answered the woman’s questions. Was someone injured? Yes. Could he stop the bleeding or move the injured person to a safe place without endangering himself? Yes, but he’s not sure what effect that would have on Eduardo. He has so many healing broken bones that Mark shudders to think how much pain he must be in from having fallen on them.

 

After Mark hangs up the phone, he reaches for Eduardo’s hand, blood and all, and grips it tight. He’s not sure why he does it, but it’s another compulsion like stealing the glasses case from Eduardo’s room, and that thought makes Mark go, _oh._ Because the broken glass must be from those stylish, black-rimmed reading glasses that Mark has grown accustomed to seeing Eduardo with around the house. It must, in fact, be from the glasses that belong in the case tucked against Mark’s chest.

 

Eventually, Mark starts to talk about fencing.

 

Later, he will not be able to say why he chose fencing as a topic that he thought Eduardo would enjoy hearing about while in a considerable amount of pain. Eduardo has never expressed much of an interest in Mark’s fencing hobby before, beyond asking at Harvard if he could come to watch the occasional meet and being declined. That’s why Mark starts with the basics, explaining the fundamentals of the sport before he works his way up to more complicated things. It is one of the few subjects about which Mark knows almost as much as he knows about code, so he is still talking about principles and ethics of the game when the distant sound of ambulance noises rouses him and he realizes that there is no one out front to show the paramedics where to come.

 

Struggling to his feet with difficulty, as though breaking through the surface of very deep water, Mark says something to Eduardo – he doesn’t remember what, later, but it must be something like _you’ll be okay_ or _I’ll come back_ or _I’m sorry, I’m sorry –_ and races through the house to the front door. The ambulance comes hurtling around the corner and onto their street even as Mark opens the front door.

 

Everything that comes next passes by Mark like the world is hurtling past and he is only able to react at half-speed. The paramedics ask him questions, and Mark does his best to answer them like a sane person.

 

_Yes, Eduardo is on medication._ When they ask him to name it, he looks perplexed for a moment, which is a mark of how badly startled he is because normally Mark does not find himself in a tumult of confusion like this, unable to get his bearings. He directs them to the pill bottles carefully stowed in Dustin’s room so that Eduardo can’t access them on his own. As the EMTs skim past him, he registers distantly that it’s sort of ironic that Eduardo _looks_ so damaged on the outside but that most of the drugs are for what’s wrong underneath, in the mind that wondered what it would be like to plunge into the San Francisco Bay from seven hundred feet up.

 

_Yes, he has prior injuries._ Mark had said all of this on the phone, he’s sure of it, but he repeats it anyway, telling them about the spine injury, all those damaged vertebrae, and the other broken bones that matter less because they won’t determine whether Eduardo walks again.

 

_No, I don’t know how he fell._ This is the first time that Mark realizes how sure he is that Eduardo didn’t fall down the stairs by accident. He doesn’t say this to the paramedics, but there is a painful pitch in his lungs as he watches them wheel Eduardo past him, bundled in blankets, his eyes hazy with pain. They pass right over Mark without recognizing him. It doesn’t even matter because Mark is suddenly afraid of the way the fury must look on his face, the rage over the absolute _audacity_ of Eduardo to try this again when they’ve all been doing their best to look out for his welfare. It’s almost enough to make Mark decline to ride in the ambulance with Eduardo to the hospital, but ultimately he finds himself sitting in the rocking cab, gripping Eduardo’s wrist tightly in white-knuckled fingers because the paramedics have already bandaged Eduardo’s bleeding hands.


	9. Drift

“We’re glad you could make it.”

 

The comment comes from Dustin’s mother, although the watery smile that accompanies it doesn’t reach all the way to her eyes and it’s transparently obvious to Chris that she resents him intruding on their grief.

 

He’s been wondering how they’ll react to his presence since he and Dustin left California. Dustin’s mother has always been sort of distant, and Chris knows why. It’s kind of a long story, but the gist of it is that Harvard’s roommate policy (or at least the roommate policy that existed while they were in school) dictates that a student can ask to be assigned to a different room if he or she discovers that his or her roommate is gay. Chris wasn’t really up front about his sexual orientation until a few months into the school year, and since Dustin is the type of guy whose mother is his sweetheart, Chris knows that he told her about him. He remembers walking into the dorm and hearing Dustin having a strident conversation over the phone about how he _likes_ his roommates and he’s _not_ changing and she’s being _old-fashioned_ and _ridiculous._

 

Chris had felt sort of queasy, sitting on the couch in the common room with the strap of his school bag clenched tightly in one hand. He could tell even then how close Dustin was with his mother; how much he valued her opinion. They spoke almost every day. It was only when Dustin emerged from the bedroom looking rattled but determined and asked Chris lightly if he’d like to play endless rounds of Medal of Honour until they collapsed from exhaustion that Chris could tell something had changed. Dustin had stood up to his mother, on Chris’ behalf. And though Mrs. Moskovitz has always been civil on the occasions when Chris has visited Dustin over the holidays or the Moskovitz clan has visited Harvard, Chris can tell that she watches him when his back is turned and wishes he weren’t around.

 

Chris is always much more friendly with her than he needs to be. He firmly believes that the more obnoxious someone is, the more you should go out of your way to make them question why they despise you so much. _I want to hate him, but he keeps asking me how my weekend was._ Chris is a deft hand at this by now.

 

So as Mrs. Moskovitz and Dustin’s sister, Brianna, settle into the front seat, Chris loads all of his and Dustin’s luggage into the trunk, waving off Dustin’s half-hearted attempt to help. To be honest, Dustin has been in a fog since about mid-flight, so he isn’t much use anyway. He kind of stands there on the curb and watches Chris like part of him is somewhere else. When they get into the car, Dustin reaches out and bunches his fingers into the fabric of Chris’ sleeve, like he is suddenly worried about what will happen now that they have the interminable distance of the middle seat in between them. Chris knows that Mrs. Moskovitz is watching them in the rear-view mirror, but he’s not here for her. This is about Dustin, and Chris doesn’t pull away.

 

They stop off at the Moskovitz house first, a leafy, non-descript suburban deal that seems like exactly the kind of place where Dustin would have grown up. Chris has been there before of course, but it seems eerily silent inside now. There is an oppressive atmosphere that lays over the house, and more than that, the other half of the parental unit that shaped Dustin into the weird and brilliant person he is, is not present.

 

If Dustin’s dad had been just like Dustin’s mom, Chris would have found reasons not to visit during the holidays, or he would have just kept inviting Dustin to North Carolina, where his own family is based. Even though Chris is capable of great empathy and great forgiveness, Dustin’s mom is equally capable of making him feel like he doesn’t exist, and Chris likes himself enough that he won’t put up with that or make endless efforts to reach out to her. At some point, something’s got to give.

 

But Dustin’s dad has been exactly the kind of engaging, gregarious person you’d expect to have raised someone like Dustin, and it’s because of him that Chris has never felt like he’s worn out his welcome at their house. Mr. Moskovitz – _call me Aaron, Chris_ – always wants to talk politics, which is directly in Chris’ wheelhouse, and he seems to be of the opinion that Chris is a fantastic influence on Dustin. Chris is not sure how he reconciles his opinion with his wife’s when they’re alone, but he’s grateful regardless.

 

Dustin and Chris leave their bags in (separate) upstairs bedrooms, and when they pile once more into the family vehicle to make the drive to the hospital, Chris finds himself in the passenger seat while Brianna drives. Mrs. Moskovitz sits in the back with her son and makes the blandest of eye contact with Chris in the mirror. Chris, as he always has, ignores it and tries to engage Brianna in small talk. She’s normally a quiet girl, prone to monosyllabic answers until she warms up to your presence, but today Chris can’t get four words out of her and eventually he gives up. Her hands grip the steering wheel so tightly, it has to hurt. There is anxiety radiating from every tense line of her body.  

 

Chris realizes that her mood is slowly creeping over Dustin and Mrs. Moskovitz as well as they draw closer to the hospital. Dustin, normally the most cheerful of ramblers even when he’s nervous, looks pale and ill. He says not a word as they get out of the car in the shadow of the hospital’s south tower, and he draws close to Chris but doesn’t touch him as they make their way inside.

 

The next hour or so goes about as Chris had expected it would. Mr. Moskovitz is the kind of tired where he keeps slipping in and out of sleep, repeating questions he’s asked twice before and peering at them all like he can’t remember where he is. Chris steps in to say hello, but quickly makes his excuses and bolts to the hallway. He almost agrees with Mrs. Moskovitz on this one; he _is_ intruding on their grief, and it feels awkward and wrong to ask Mr. Moskovitz to waste words on him when the old man doesn’t even have the right ones left for his family.

 

Chris registers with a touch of wryness that this feeling is similar to the one he had had years ago in that dorm room at Kirkland, listening to Dustin argue with his mother on the phone. He is no longer quite sure that it was a good idea to come. Mr. Moskovitz is _really_ far gone and the man whose welcoming presence has always been waiting in Florida for Chris feels almost like a stranger now. When the effect of that is combined with the way the iciness is radiating from Mrs. Moskovitz in waves, Chris feels suddenly homesick. Not for California – for North Carolina, where his own parents live in a considerably smaller, shabbier house, refusing to move into a nicer one even though Chris has the money now to put them up in a penthouse for the rest of their lives.

 

Chris has risen and begun to pace when Dustin exits the room suddenly, so fast he almost stumbles. When he rights himself, the look in his eyes is enough to remind Chris why he came at all, and the homesickness fades into the background a little. There’s something innately warm about brown eyes as opposed to blue or green ones, and Dustin’s have always been magnetic and friendly, the ones Chris looks for across a crowded room so they can share an in-joke and a smirk. Now they’re tired and dull, red-rimmed, and Chris watches Dustin approach with a sinking feeling in his gut, like Dustin has shifted slightly and is no longer someone Chris knows like the backs of his own hands.

 

“I don’t know what to do,” Dustin murmurs, worn _out_ , and he just sort of leans forward and rests his forehead on Chris’ collarbone. Maybe it looks awkward, because Dustin is definitely taller than Chris and he is arms are sort of just hanging at his sides, but Chris decides not to care because the surge of warmth and sympathy in his chest is infinitely more important.

 

“I know,” he says, and when he brings up his hands to – he doesn’t even know, hold onto Dustin somehow, maybe, Dustin moves at the same time and they end up awkwardly bumping hands. Chris retreats first, like he always will as the gay one with the straight best friend, because you don’t test physical boundaries that could ruin your relationship. Chris innately knows that this is silly at this point, considering how close they are, but it’s programmed in. Dustin ends up curling his fingers around Chris’ biceps. “I don’t know if there’s anything you _can_ do,” Chris murmurs.

 

Dustin lets out something that sounds like a half-sob, or would if he had a chest cold. It’s a tight, helpless noise that makes Chris’ chest constrict. “I feel like we’re just standing around waiting for him to die. It’s _awful._ ”

 

“You’re here. He’s happy to see you. It’s important.” Chris is not sure where the faintly desperate note in his tone came from, like he wants to reassure Dustin at the same time that he is positive he can’t.

 

“You’re here, too,” Dustin replies, after a long moment. “Thank you. For coming. Don’t think I can’t tell how my mom is trying to figure out how to push you in front of a bus without getting caught.”

 

Chris gives a stifled, dry chuckle.  “She voted for Bush. We were never going to get along.”

 

Chris is not sure how, but he feels Dustin smile. They stand like that for a moment or two longer before Dustin lifts his head and takes a step back, though he doesn’t relinquish his grip on Chris’ arms.

 

“Let’s go for a walk,” Dustin suggests. He looks marginally more alert than he did before, Chris is pleased to note; the sadness has retreated a little, and his eyes are clearer. “I can’t stand it in here, it’s – stifling.” He glances back toward the slightly open door to his father’s hospital room, as though he can see his mother and sister huddled around the bed through the thick oak. “I told you they’d be like this.”

 

Dustin almost races out of the hospital, and some of the colour returns to his face when they meet the warm evening air.

 

“It’s so _heavy_ in there. It’s like, I can’t even – ” Dustin throws up his hands. Chris is glad to see a little of his usual theatricality come back.

 

“I don’t know how you guys are doing it.” Chris shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine what I would do. You’re a trooper, D-Man.”

 

“Well, so they say,” Dustin replies amiably, and they walk along in silence for a minute or two. Then Dustin, abruptly, begins to sprint, and Chris, bewildered, quickens his pace to keep Dustin in his line of sight. It’s not long before he can see the jungle gym that Dustin spotted first, and he already knows that Dustin is bee-lining for the swings.

 

By the time Chris arrives, Dustin is pumping his legs forward and back, gliding higher than he probably should on a swing-set designed for the children in the sick kids’ wing of the hospital. Chris stands off to the side, hands tucked into his pockets, and glances up at Dustin.

 

“Blowing off steam?” Chris inquires.

 

“Yep.” Dustin is swinging almost aggressively high now.

 

“Is it helping?”

 

Dustin gives a considering shrug. “It’s not _not_ helping.”

 

Chris watches him for a moment longer before he turns away slightly as his phone begins to ring. It’s Mark, which on the one hand is gratifying because Chris was about to call him to touch base, but on the other hand it inspires a little bit of terror because Mark always forgets to keep Chris in the loop so the timing of the call is odd.

 

“Hey, Mark.”

 

Mark mutters something so fast that Chris doesn’t catch it the first time around, and he has to ask Mark to repeat it.

 

“I _said_ , Eduardo’s in the hospital again. He fell down Dustin’s patio stairs.”

 

Chris freezes. Behind him, he can hear Dustin slowing on the swing, clearly noticing that something is amiss.

 

“Jesus. Is he okay?”

 

A note of irritation creeps into Mark’s voice. “He set himself back three months in recovery. He re-shattered his wrist and threw his whole back out of alignment.”

 

Chris winces. “How did it even happen?” He demands. “The point of suicide watch is that you _watch_ him, Mark.”

 

“I know how _suicide watch_ works,” Mark snaps. “He was acting normal and the last time we just sat in the living room and watched stupid TV shows – well, he watched stupid TV shows, I coded and threw in appropriately derisive commentary when necessary – so I assumed he would come back at some point and we’d do that again. And then I noticed that I hadn’t seen him in awhile.”

 

Chris expels a breath. “Mark, we _trusted_ you with this – ”

 

“It’s not my fault!” Mark explodes. “I can’t follow him around all day, we’d both go stir-crazy and you know it. I’m the absolute worst person you could have chosen to do this and I’m sorry that I said yes, all right?”

 

Chris doesn’t even know what to say. “Are you there with him now? Can you – ” He scrubs a hand through his hair, frustrated. Chris is only one person, he can’t be two places at once, and there is apparently no one he can actually count on to act responsibly on his behalf. “Can you please call his sister?”

 

There is a moment of silence that’s like the innocent warning whistle before a mortar falls. “I will not call his _sister_.”

 

“ _Mark –_ ”

 

“ _No_ ,” Mark cuts in. “She didn’t even want me to see him, do you have any idea what she’s going to be like when she hears that he tried to commit suicide again on my watch?”

 

Chris fumbles. “You think it was a suicide attempt?”

 

Mark only snorts in reply.

 

“Why?” Chris demands, wondering how exactly Mark came upon Eduardo, whether there was blood, or – Chris doesn’t even know.

 

“What else would it be?” Mark returns. “He _accidentally_ wheeled himself down a flight of stairs? Give me a break.”

 

Chris is struggling to wrap his mind around this. “He seemed like he was – improving. Didn’t he seem like he was getting better?” He turns to Dustin and repeats the question, and Dustin, who looks like he is slowly figuring out what they’re talking about based solely on Chris’ side of the conversation, shrugs and looks as puzzled as Chris feels.

 

“I’m not his fucking shrink,” Mark says, and Chris thinks that there is something dark and sad about the tone in Mark’s voice, like he is _disappointed_. Chris has a hunch that Mark thought Eduardo would be easier to fix than this.

 

“I know you’re not, Mark,” Chris says, with a quiet sigh. “I just thought – you know, maybe with all of us around, he would start to feel better about everything.”

 

“You can’t throw some smiles and happy times at a chemical imbalance and expect it to make a – a significant difference,” Dustin offers, sounding older than Chris is accustomed to.

 

“No,” Chris agrees. His hand is bunched in his hair, and he relaxes his grip slowly, feeling some of the anxiety flow out of him. “We’ll just have to figure this out. Together, when Dustin and I get back.”

 

“Yeah, you were a bit vague on when that would be,” Mark replies.

 

“Watch it,” Chris warns, and he can tell that the way he says it gets Mark’s attention because of the utter silence on the other end of the line. There is not even the distant echo of typing.

 

“Watch what?”

 

“Dustin and I have spent a long time putting our – stuff on the back burner in favour of your stuff,” Chris points out, and he’s been kind of holding back on saying this to Mark since the lawsuit, so it comes out in a tone that leaves no room for discussion. “Dustin’s dad is really sick.”

 

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Mark says, like he’s not sure if that’s what Chris wants to hear or not.

 

“As you should be, as Dustin’s friend,” Chris replies, careful and controlled. “But you should also be aware that I can’t come back and deal with whatever’s going on with Eduardo right now so you’re going to have to be an adult and do it yourself.”

 

Mark expels a breath through his nose, and Chris can’t tell if it’s supposed to be derisive or simply an indication of annoyance. Mark doesn’t bother to clarify.

 

“Please don’t fight with him when he wakes up,” Chris reminds Mark, because if he knows anything about Facebook’s CEO – and at this point, he really, really does – it’s that Mark won’t be able to conceal his frustration and disappointment about what Eduardo has done. And as easy as it would be to lay the blame on Eduardo’s shoulders and give him hell for being so selfish, Chris knows that Dustin is right, that you don’t just sprinkle magic unicorn feel-good words on something as deep-seated as what’s going on with Eduardo and expect Rome to be built in a day.

 

“I’m not promising anything,” Mark answers.

 

“Mark,” Chris begins warningly, but Mark isn’t having it.

 

“Trust me when I say that I understand how to navigate my relationship with him better than you do.” Mark hangs up before Chris can get another word in, and even the dial tone sounds abrupt and angry.

 

“You can go back if you need to,” Dustin tells Chris, and Chris turns to him and already knows that Dustin wouldn’t even begrudge him that. They’ve gotten so accustomed to letting Mark and Eduardo’s drama take center stage that they just universally accept it in any situation, or maybe it’s that neither of them are very good at being selfish.

 

“I don’t need to,” Chris says firmly. “Mark’s a big kid, he can handle this. I’m not going to work for Facebook forever, or even live in California. At some point, he’s going to have a stranger doing my job who will put up with considerably less shit than I do for a much higher salary, and he’s not going to have anyone to run damage control in his personal life. So he might as well learn now.”

 

Dustin raises his eyebrows, impressed, but also looks amused and affectionate. “You’re preaching to the very choir itself, Magic.”

 

Chris is temporarily distracted. Dustin hasn’t called him that in a long, _long_ time. It’s still the name under which Chris’ number is saved in Dustin’s phone and all, but that’s because of a silly inside joke from freshman year. They had been facing down a competitive game of beer pong with a dented ping pong ball. Chris, a fair-weather smoker at the time, had lit his lighter under the ball, causing it to expand and push out the dent. Dustin had immediately insisted that it was magic and had referred to Chris as such for the rest of the night.

 

“I wish I knew some actual magic tricks,” Chris says, with a note of dryness. “I can think of one person I’d magic to the moon right off the bat.”

 

Dustin grins. “He’s not so bad. It’s just that all that curly hair makes it hard for any well-meaning advice or common sense to permeate his skull.”

 

Chris wants to smile, he really does. Unfortunately, everything that’s going on makes him too worried and anxious to pull it off convincingly. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Eduardo.”

 

“He’s okay for now, though?” Dustin asks. “I mean, really okay? They’ve got him in the hospital and there are people around?”

 

“Yeah, he’s being taken care of,” Chris answers. “I just thought we were doing – you know, pretty well with him. So I don’t know how to prevent a second relapse.”

 

“Maybe this is out of our pay grade, Chris,” Dustin suggests gently. “Maybe Eduardo needs to live with his family and – well, it can’t be easy being around Mark all the time, you know? Maybe he’d have a better time if he were anywhere but California.”

 

Chris looks uneasy. “I don’t want to give up on him like that. It seems kind of...” He searches for the correct way to say it, and Dustin waits, patient. Chris pulls something from memory that he thinks will serve. “Remember when we were hungover that one Sunday at the end of the semester and we built that colossal tower out of all the red solo cups we’d used over the term?”

 

Dustin tilts his head back to the stars and grins, remembering. “I drew a mustache on Eduardo’s face while he was passed out on our couch so he decided to make the best of it and appoint himself Gentleman Supervisor of the project.”

 

Chris grins, too. “He kept stroking it. I thought you were going to die.”

 

“And Mark was taking it super seriously because I told him he could be the official Head Engineer.”

 

Chris shakes his head, his smile fading. “Do you see what I mean? There was a time when we all really _liked_ each other.”

 

“Look,” Dustin tells him. “We were bad friends when we sort of buried our heads in the sand and let the dilution happen. I mean, we didn’t _know_ , but we could tell that things weren’t going okay. And Mark and Eduardo were bad friends when they put us in the middle during the lawsuit. But this isn’t being a bad friend. We’re not giving up on Eduardo. We tried to help him get better and it didn’t work. So now the best thing might be to let someone else give it a go.”

 

Chris wishes he weren’t struggling with this so much. He shakes his head, noncommittal, and says, “I don’t know. You’re probably right.”

 

Dustin reaches out and tugs on the sleeve of Chris’ sweater. “Remember what you said to Mark? About us not being able to fix things for him all the time? That has to be true for Eduardo, too.”

 

“When did you get like the Chinese guy from the Karate Kid?” Chris demands, nudging Dustin’s shoulder with his own as they fall into step beside one another and start back toward the hospital.

 

“I’m always wise, I just hide it really well,” Dustin explains.

 

\--

 

Mark does not call Natalia. He knows that he should, that as Eduardo’s official next-of-kin she should probably be notified her brother tried to punch his own ticket again, but he’s really not interested in having that conversation with her. _Let her find out later that I knew before she did,_ he thinks, with grim satisfaction.

 

His wait at the hospital is basically one long, boring, monotonous stretch punctuated periodically by blips of anxiety whenever someone hurries down the hall in the direction of Eduardo’s room or hurries back up toward Mark. He’s already been told that Eduardo’s in stable condition, but they brought him to the operating room on arrival and Mark hasn’t been allowed to see him since. The phone conversation with Chris didn’t lighten the mood any; in fact, if anything, Mark is pretty sure he wants to rage at Eduardo more than ever. Mark doesn’t like this feeling crawling under his skin, like he’s become aware in the past little while how much Eduardo’s welfare matters to him, when he’s been trying to bury that all this time. Eduardo is frustrating Mark’s attempts to _just not care_ , and Mark despises being dragged into this shit, he really does. He hates that Eduardo gets to _manipulate_ him like this.

 

So when a doctor in pale green scrubs comes out to tell him what they’ve done for Eduardo in fragments of words that drift past Mark’s mind’s eye without really sticking – don’t get him wrong, Mark will remember everything later in perfect detail, but right now he’s giving the doctor the smallest part of his attention, the _minimum amount –_ Mark looks down the hall at Eduardo’s door and readies himself for a blowout.

 

It turns out that they’re not going to do this tonight, or maybe even tomorrow. Eduardo is out cold, snug in the hospital blankets, with purple bruises under his eyes. The pale orange hospital gown isn’t doing him any favours, and he looks white as death. Mark feels a tug under his ribcage, and counter-intuitively, he thinks, _Fuck you, Eduardo Saverin._

 

 Mark is nothing if not stubborn, however, and he settles himself down on the chair next to the bed with its bald patches and uneven stuffing and folds his arms across his chest. He’ll sit there all night if he has to.

 

Four hours later, a nurse is shaking him awake. “Mr. Zuckerberg,” she whispers, as Mark comes to in the darkened room. The only light comes from the half-open door to the hallway.

 

“Yeah,” Mark mutters, blinking as he gets his bearings. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

 

“Okay,” the nurse replies blandly. She’s not going to argue with him. Mark wonders if she’s been forewarned. “You’re welcome to go home and sleep. We’ll keep an eye on Mr. Saverin and you can come back first thing in the morning.”

 

“No,” Mark says flatly. “I’ll stay.”

 

“We really can handle this, sir,” she says gently, misinterpreting Mark’s reaction.

 

“You can handle this?” Mark asks, and he can see the _uh-oh_ behind her eyes. It gives him a thrill of triumph and makes him inject an extra streak of meanness when he says, “It was your crack medical team that decided he wasn’t a hazard to himself and to let him out of the hospital. It’s your ridiculous hospital that has Crying Jesus up on the wall looking down on a very-lapsed Jew like somehow that’s supposed to accomplish something. You should probably go before Eduardo figures out what he’s going to sue you over, he’s very good at that.”

 

Mark detects nothing behind the nurse’s sober expression, but she does busy herself on the other side of Eduardo’s bed for a moment without replying before she starts to walk out.

 

“Here, take this with you.” Mark rises, steps up onto his chair and pulls the religious portrait down from the wall over Eduardo’s bed. “You can tell Crying Jesus not to do us any favours.”

 

The nurse takes the frame out of Mark’s hands with a little bit of a jerk and continues out the door without making eye contact. Mark thinks he’s sincerely ruffled her feathers, and he thinks savagely, _Good._

 

Mark settles down into the chair again, snug in the warmth of his hoodie, and it doesn’t take long for him to doze off again since he’s decided now not to fight it. He thinks he’ll wake up before Eduardo anyway, and he’s right.

 

When Mark opens his eyes next, it is because a watery shaft of sunlight is poking through the crack in the curtains, pressing insistently at the backs of Mark’s closed eyelids. His eyes feel gritty and dry, and there is a distant pulsing ache in his temple from his fitful, cramped rest. Rising, Mark almost staggers as he attempts to stretch out his muscles, which creak and protest after a night crumpled into a chair. Mark remembers being hunched over a keyboard for thirty-six hours at a time in college with minimum repercussions and realizes, disconcerted, _One day I’ll be old._

 

He doesn’t think, _I’m older now_ , because it sounds melodramatic. Mark’s not even twenty-five. He has all kinds of time.

 

After all, he’s already the CEO of one of the most successful tech start-ups of all time.

 

The only thing about getting everything you want before your quarter-century is that you have to start figuring out what the next step is, and you also have ample time to realize that what you have is not, in fact, everything you want. Maybe what you wanted changed over time, or maybe it’s a matter of reaching the peak and thinking to yourself, _Is this it?_

 

Mark’s never going to be blasé about his accomplishments where Facebook is concerned, but he has some closure left to get and some arguments left to have and damned if he isn’t going to put his nose to the grindstone and make those things happen. He always needs to have a goal. Being driven is like that.

 

Mark tucks his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and frowns down at Eduardo. He’s not sure how long he stands like that before Eduardo, perhaps sensing the laser vision attempting to eat through his skull, stirs and sucks in a frantic breath like he’s forgotten to do it all night. When he opens his eyes, they are slightly crossed, and he looks frightened and confused. Mark reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder, because something tells him already that Eduardo is going to try to sit up, and he’s not wrong. When Eduardo’s eyes orient themselves and land on Mark, he stops struggling and the anxiety drains out of him. Slumping back against the pillows, he closes his eyes again for a moment, his breathing slowing down.

 

“You scared the shit... I thought you were some stranger,” Eduardo mumbles.

 

Mark has taken back his hand now, and he regards Eduardo from the imperious distance of two and a half feet. “I’m sorry,” he says, though he’s not, and it’s transparently obvious as usual.

 

“No, it’s – just stupid. I mean, who would it be?” Eduardo smiles faintly, sheepishly. “I had bad dreams all night, it was probably just a carry-over.” He either doesn’t notice or chooses not to comment on the insincerity of Mark’s apology, which is also business as usual.

 

“Probably.”

 

Eduardo looks up at Mark, a nervous smile creasing his forehead. “Sit down, will you?” Mark’s awkward posture, the way he’s standing and almost leaning over Eduardo, has finally caught the latter’s attention.

 

“No.”

 

Okay, so, Mark is never what Eduardo would categorize as easy-to-get-along-with, but he’s being a special brand of belligerent now and it alerts Eduardo that all is not as it should be. “What’s going on with you?”

 

“Nothing.” Mark’s mouth twists. “What’s going on with you.”

 

Eduardo genuinely has no idea what’s going on. “Well, I’m kind of foggy, to be honest. You know how I deal with pain meds.”

 

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Mark tells him, and Eduardo stares at him, uncomprehending, until Mark snaps, “Tell me what’s going on that led to you wheeling yourself off the edge of Dustin’s porch.”

 

“Wheeling myself...” Eduardo furrows his brow. “You think I did it on purpose?”

 

“Of course you did it on purpose,” Mark hisses. “It was a little anticlimactic after the bridge but I guess you had to make do with what you had – ”

 

“Did you just wait here all night so you could ambush me?” Eduardo demands, and he has gone from perplexed to furious and hurt, which just makes Mark even angrier because he _has_ been here all night, damn it, and doesn’t Eduardo _see_ – ?  

 

“I think you owe me an explanation,” Mark snarls.

 

“I didn’t do it on purpose, Mark,” Eduardo insists, not even sure why he has to justify himself to Mark, except that he really, really does. “If I’d wanted to kill myself I could’ve just taken all my pills at once.”

 

“No, you couldn’t have, we keep them locked in the cabinet because you’re on _suicide watch_.” Mark’s eyes burn dark in his bloodless face. “I was the appointed watcher and you decided you’d just go ahead and fuck me over by ending it on my watch, is that it?”

 

“ _No_ ,” Eduardo snaps. “What? Mark, _no_ , I wouldn’t _do that –_ ”

 

Mark doesn’t even want to hear about it. He paces away from the bed and then back again, opening his mouth once to speak, reconsidering it, and pacing away again.

 

“I’m sorry it happened,” Eduardo says almost pleadingly, and his voice has risen in volume, like he feels he has to pull Mark back to him. Mark is surprised that no one has come in to intervene yet, but then, it’s always felt a little bit like his and Eduardo’s fights are the fiery spark at the very centre of the universe, that all eyes must be on them. “I went outside to get some reading in before the sun went down, and I...” Here Eduardo shakes his head slightly in confusion, like exact specifics are starting to evade him. “I think something startled me and I sort of rolled backward without looking and – and just fell down the stairs.” He sounds helpless, like he doesn’t know what to do without the exact right memory that will convince Mark that he’s _not lying._

 

More quietly, sounding desperate, Eduardo adds, “I was out there for so long before you found me. I thought no one would ever come. And I just couldn’t... pass _out_.”

 

Mark still doesn’t say anything, and Eduardo knows he should be pissed _off_ that Mark is doing this to him when he’s lying in a hospital bed, but most of what filters through in his voice is anxiety. “It was brutal, Mark. And I promise that I didn’t do it on purpose. I don’t know what else you want from me.”

 

Mark stops in his tracks and spins around to look at Eduardo. “I want you to stop lying to yourself. Is that a lot to ask? Like, is that an excessive demand?” Mark spreads his hands, a quick, curt gesture. “I’m seriously asking because I don’t even know what else to say to you right now.”

 

“I’m not _lying_!” Eduardo doesn’t mean to yell, but there’s a familiar reaction in Mark’s face, and Eduardo has a sudden, blurry recollection: _Is he? How about now? Is he wired in now?_

 

And then Mark bypasses his surprise at how quickly Eduardo’s emotions escalate, taking it in stride much, much better than he had during their arguments before they’d shut each other out, all that time ago now. “You _are_ lying, and you’re an _idiot_ if you think you’re not.”

 

“ _Fuck_ you.” Eduardo is hunched forward, raising himself up as high as he can without the requisite assistance he needs to sit up. “I don’t know why I thought it would be okay to have you around again, you’ve always been an asshole.”

 

“I might be an asshole but I’m not a liar,” Mark says, with that air of such arrogant righteousness that Eduardo has always wanted to slap right off his face.

 

“Oh? Oh, you’re not a liar?”

 

And this is it. They are standing on the edge of the great precipice that has been haunting them since the lawsuit. Since they started speaking again after The Fall, they’ve been moving closer and closer to it without acknowledging it, and now they have arrived. They can step back now, maybe, although that option is fast disappearing with every moment that their eyes stay locked from opposite ends of the hospital room.

 

They are going to start fighting about the dilution, and six hundred million dollars, and _What did you mean, get left behind?_ It’s begun, and Eduardo doesn’t know if he would stop it if he could.

 

They’ve never fought about it, not really, barring the brief episode during which Eduardo had destroyed Mark’s laptop. After that, everything was narrowed down to their lawyers hashing out how much Eduardo was owed of the company he got off the ground, in terms of dollars and cents and ownership shares.

 

Eduardo is already bracing himself for the hurtful things he knows that Mark is going to say, because Mark has always been the type of person who will win an argument at any cost if he firmly believes he is right. And Mark, for his part... well, Mark just doesn’t know how they’ll get past this without going _through_ it, and he’s pretty sure that yes, at some point, he does want to be past this, if only because it means moving on with his life.

 

“No, I’m not a liar,” Mark says, and it sets Eduardo up beautifully; it’s like this is a game they scheduled in advance and they both know that they need to say and do to make the other person put everything out into the open.

 

“Really? That’s really funny, Mark, because I remember having a phone conversation with you wherein you invited me out to the Million Members party and I showed up to an ambush.” Eduardo is properly angry now, and Mark no longer has that tiny, microscopic thread of guilt for fighting with someone who won’t fight back. Eduardo just needs to be pushed far enough, Mark knows. Once he is, his rage is a force much stronger than Mark’s, but markedly less controlled.

 

“I didn’t lie to you about that,” Mark snaps. “I never told you that there wouldn’t be consequences for freezing the account – ”

 

“That is such a _cop-out_ , Mark,” Eduardo interrupts, and Mark remembers that part too, how Eduardo’s anger is so much _more_ than Mark’s that he overrides him, which is always startling because it happens so rarely that Eduardo puts Mark on the defensive instead of vice versa. “That wasn’t a consequence for freezing the account, that was something you did because Sean Parker was whispering in your ear and Peter Thiel had fucking dollar signs in his eyes.”

 

“How do you know that?” Mark scoffs.

 

“Because you _told me_ ,” Eduardo hisses at him.

 

“When did I – ”

 

“When you told me you were worried I’d get left behind!” Eduardo doesn’t even have the patience to let Mark get to the end of his obtuse questions anymore. “You already knew, you could’ve given me some forewarning about what was happening – you were the _CEO_ , you could’ve _stopped_ what was happening.”

 

“I didn’t know you would react the way you did.” Mark says it like Eduardo had been responsible for a major overreaction. “My vision for Facebook was important to me and you wouldn’t listen so I went along with what they proposed to me. But I didn’t know you would react the way you did.”

 

“ _Fuck_ you,” Eduardo almost shouts, echoing himself from earlier in the timeline, but he doesn’t care. “I wanted to be part of Facebook or I wouldn’t have given you the money. I wanted to be part of something with _you_. I spent hours plotting strategy with you for expanding the site. We talked about user-friendliness, privacy, fucking _poking_ , even, and you knew I was invested, money and talent, from day one.”

 

“Then you should have come out to California,” Mark lashes out, lightning-fast. “If you were so invested, you should have come with us to Palo Alto and gotten on board with what I wanted for _my_ website.”

 

“I didn’t know it would grow as fast as it did,” Eduardo protests, and Mark realizes, as though on autopilot: _I turned the tables._  It is Eduardo against the ropes now. “When I was growing up, my dad dealt in real, concrete things in his business, I was familiar with an _old-world_ business model. It’s still a business model that works. I just didn’t know it wouldn’t work for a tech start-up.”

 

“Well, I trust you know better now,” Mark says venomously, and Eduardo wants to hit him.

 

“Oh, trust me, I learned that lesson when you had me _incised_ from the company we built together _behind my back_.” Eduardo’s eyes are wet, but he’s not crying so much as so, _so_ angry.

 

“Did you expect me to do it to your face?” Mark asks, flippant because he knows that this is what winds Eduardo up.

 

Eduardo doesn’t bite. “Until I heard it from a lawyer that you’d rather see me on the other side of a deposition table than be my friend or my business partner, yes, I trusted you.”

 

“That’s not what I _meant_ by diluting your shares _–_ ” Mark begins, because Eduardo still doesn’t _understand_ that it was just _business_ , but Eduardo doesn’t let him get there.

 

“Save it,” he snarls.

 

Mark’s lip curls. “You never understood where I was coming from.”

 

“Maybe not,” Eduardo replies, bitter. “But you couldn’t even tell that stabbing me in the back would make me stop wanting to have anything to do with you, so learn some fucking social cues.”

 

Mark knows that this is the point normally when Eduardo would turn away, perhaps to let his anger flare out or even to go to another room to throw things in peace if he’s really wound up, but Eduardo can’t go anywhere.

 

“I think you should go,” Eduardo grinds out, when Mark just stands there with his hands clenched into fists.

 

“Or what?” Mark asks.

 

“I’ll call the nurse in,” Eduardo warns.

 

Mark snorts. “And then what?”

 

“Don’t you think I would tell her _anything_ to make you get the fuck out right now?” Eduardo’s eyes are actually wet now, Mark recognizes, disconcerted. He always goes to emotional extremes that Mark can only dream of, but Mark is quickly becoming cognizant of the fact that something has to come after all that rage breaks, and the only place left to go is down.

 

“Don’t cry,” Mark says suddenly, abruptly, and Eduardo misunderstands what he means, because Mark isn’t saying it to make fun of Eduardo but Mark doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to being sensitive.

 

The expression on Eduardo’s face twists and turns ugly. “Get. _Out._ ”

 

“Wardo,” Mark says in consternation.

 

“What do you _want_?” Eduardo demands, his voice cracking. He smudges the back of his hand almost violently under one eye, following it with the heel of the same hand. The other one, with the recently re-damaged wrist, sits uselessly, bandaged tightly on top of the blankets.

 

Mark is well aware that Eduardo will not thank him later for forcing his presence on him while he’s upset like this, but Mark is paralyzed.

 

“Why do you never understand what I’m saying?” Mark sounds strained, and it’s that, more than anything, that makes Eduardo properly _look_ at Mark.

 

“I don’t read minds, Mark,” Eduardo says, and he sounds tired; his voice matches how swollen and dark his eyes are. “What you’re actually asking me is why I never understand what you’re _not_ saying.”

 

Mark stares at Eduardo for long enough that the latter huffs a bitter, humourless laugh and looks down and away, wiping less-than-gently at his eyes again.

 

“I should’ve come out to California.” Eduardo shakes his head slightly, defeated. “And I shouldn’t have forgotten that thinking I could really care about you didn’t mean you weren’t capable of destroying my life.”

 

Mark’s forgotten that the way Eduardo burns so hot when he’s furious means that he can’t go on being brittle and mean-spirited for hours the way Mark can. Eduardo would win the sprint but Mark always wins the marathons. And so at the end of things, Eduardo gets like this, and _damn it_ , it makes Mark angry again because he feels _guilty_ now and Eduardo is manipulating him _again_.

 

“It wasn’t all about you,” Mark says coolly, and he’s less than happy to see the way Eduardo raises his eyes to him with an awful knowingness in his gaze.

 

“No. It was about Facebook.” There is a dreadful silence. Mark becomes aware of something looming in the space between them, and he is suddenly the one who wants to be gone - which is odd for him, because backing down is not his _modus operandi_. Eduardo seems to sense this, because before Mark can make up his mind about it, he adds, raggedly, “I was collateral damage.”

 

And that’s what makes Mark spin on his heel and walk away. He doesn’t know why that particular assortment of words hits him like a freight train because Mark doesn’t self-reflect (it’s a waste of his time and spectacularly over-qualified neurons) but even the plastic chairs in the waiting room at the end of the hall don’t feel far enough, and he shoves his way blindly into the stairwell and sits down on the top step. He doesn’t feel better until the door swings to with a muted _clang_ behind him, putting four inches of steel between him and his _collateral damage_.


	10. Perspective

Sean’s appearances in Mark’s life nowadays are like a whirlwind that dips down without warning and then carries itself off again. This time is no different; Sean is sitting on the steps outside of Dustin’s house when Mark arrives, worn down and worn _out_ from his visit with Eduardo, and the one-time Napster inventor dangles a six-pack of Corona in front of Mark’s face and invites himself inside. Mark doesn’t have the energy to say that he would really rather sit by himself and get some work done right now, and his strategy with most people, where he acts increasingly rude and obtuse until they go away, doesn’t work with Sean. So Mark resigns himself to a beer – or three – with him, because Sean is as ruthless as Mark but he sees people better, so maybe he’s going to be helpful for once, who knows. Or maybe he just wants something, which is equally likely.

 

Sean disappears into the kitchen, talking the whole way about whatever nonsense he’s been up to, basically a smattering of legitimate tech stuff amid a whole ream of gossip about people they know and know _of_ in the industry. When he returns he has somehow located a sad-looking lime in Dustin’s fridge, and he slices it up and pops a piece into the neck of Mark’s beer with a flourish.

 

“There. Now you’ve got a beer, and I’ve got a beer, and we can sit here like classy gents and watch the world go by.” Sean relaxes back into the couch cushions, making himself at home in the place where Mark usually sits when he’s coding.

 

“I think you were right, about what you said about Eduardo.” Mark has the bottle clenched in one fist and he takes sporadic gulps, mostly, Sean suspects, to keep his hands busy. Most people would be consider a comment like that to have come out of the blue, but Sean knows Mark better than that at this point. This is why Sean came, after all.

 

“Which part?” Sean asks, glancing at him as he takes a pull of his own beer.

 

Mark shakes his head slightly, like he doesn’t have any space left to process the faint, disrespectful note of condescension that will always feature in Sean’s and Eduardo’s voices when they talk about each other. For Sean, at least, he doesn’t mean it quite as much anymore; it’s more force of habit than anything else, at this point.

 

“When he jumped off the Golden Gate,” Mark begins to answer, his fingers white-knuckled around the neck of a bottle that appears forgotten now that it is mostly empty. It is resting on his knee and leaving a wet ring in the denim of his jeans that Mark doesn’t seem to notice. “He said it wasn’t suicide.”

 

“Of course I was right about that, look at the facts,” Sean begins, but Mark gives him a look that silences him. From Mark’s end of it, he thinks, _Sean would be a terrible shrink._ But Sean is the one person in Mark’s life who has it even less together than he does, so he is a safe person to admit flaws to because Sean doesn’t ever get that unbearable note of pity in his eyes that Chris or Dustin do sometimes. Beyond that, he doesn’t want to hang around in Mark’s life long enough to fix anything; Sean will just offer advice and disappear again.

 

“I know it was a suicide attempt,” Mark tells him. “At first it was easy not to think so because it’s unpleasant to believe that someone who was once a friend of yours did that and you didn’t see it coming. I don’t like to be blindsided.” Among other things, but Mark isn’t here to admit vulnerability.

 

“Well, I’m pretty sure you were not the only one surprised,” Sean mutters.

 

Mark continues like Sean hasn’t even spoken. “And then he rolled himself off Dustin’s back stairs last night, and he says it was an accident but I know it wasn’t. It made me realize that I didn’t believe that the bridge was an accident, either. Eduardo has a particular talent for lying to himself but he has never been especially good at lying to me.”

 

“Well, just out of curiosity, how do you know the stairs weren’t an accident?” This might be Sean’s paranoid side, used to seeing conspiracies wherever he goes, or maybe he’s just picking out the things from Mark’s sentences that are the least heavy to deal with. Either way, it makes Mark look at him sharply, like this is a statement Sean might regret having to defend.

 

“How do you accidentally fall down a set of stairs in a wheelchair?” Mark demands. “He said he went outside to read, it’s not like he was – _bird-watching_ and not paying attention to where he was going.”

 

“Okay.” Sean considers this for a moment and then spreads his hands. “It’s easy enough to find out if he’s lying.”

 

Mark cocks a scary eyebrow. It’s the expression that makes his employees brace themselves for an onslaught of withering sarcasm. That side of Mark was not the side that Mark initially exposed him to, so Sean never learned to tread carefully when he sees it. Mark sort of regrets sometimes that he never bothered to set up appropriate boundaries of fear and respect where Sean is concerned.

 

“Oh?”

 

Sean nods. “Yeah, man. Come on.”

 

He rises, and he is halfway across the room before he realizes that Mark isn’t following. With an exaggerated, sweeping gesture indicating that Mark should precede him out the door, Sean turns back. “Come _on_ , Mark.”

 

Mark rises and slouches out into the kitchen ahead of Sean, but only because Sean is making the stupidest expression like he thinks this is going to be a riot, like they’re fucking _private investigators_ or something, and Mark just wants to get it over with.

 

They emerge onto the porch. Mark is somewhat more reluctant to face the sunlight that Sean, who immediately walks over to the stairs and looks down them.

 

“Wow,” he says, with a whistle. “That’s some drop.”

 

“Yeah.” Mark doesn’t get close, squinting in irritation at the sudden brightness after the dim coolness of the house. For some reason, seeing the gap in the railing where the stairs are, just that drop off into nothing, is forbidding.

 

“So he said he came out to read, right?” Sean crouches down, like he thinks inspecting the stairs from another angle will help. “What? Like, a newspaper? A book? A – _Kindle_?”

 

“Eduardo doesn’t have a Kindle,” Mark mutters.

 

“Eduardo seems like the kind of dork who would have a Kindle,” Sean responds, as though it’s self-evident.

 

“It wasn’t a fucking Kindle,” Mark snaps. “It was probably a book. He’s been reading a lot more fiction lately.” Than Mark remembers, anyway. In college, Eduardo spent a lot of time reading textbooks and autobiographies and news magazines. Mark’s not sure if the novel thing is new for Eduardo, or just new in Mark’s experience of Eduardo. Maybe he’s been a novel type of guy for years. It wouldn’t be the first time Eduardo’s surprised Mark lately, Mark reflects with a grim wryness.

 

“A book.” Sean nods once. “Okay. Then we look for a book.”

 

“Assuming it exists.” Mark cocks his head slightly, indicating that he assumes this is unlikely.

 

“Okay, Captain Buzzkillington, let me get my CSI on for a few minutes without nay-saying,” Sean tells him, which garners no response from Mark because it’s too ridiculous to deign worthy of a cutting comeback.

 

“So he came out here with his book,” Sean begins without waiting for an answer, launching himself into full-on reconstruction mode. Hey, he’s seen all the TV shows.

 

“He had his reading glasses,” Mark says suddenly, not sure why he finds the need to be helpful.

 

Sean points at him. “That’s what I’m talking about, my hard-nosed crime-fighting partner, fifteen-year force veteran.”

 

Mark assumes that this makes Sean the hot-headed, trigger-happy rookie, which – well, if they’re being honest with themselves, they’ve probably swapped both roles back and forth a number of times now in the span of their relationship.

 

“His chair was tipped... like that.” Mark planes his hand to the side to show Sean which direction Eduardo must have fallen in. He still hangs well back from the stairs.

 

Sean nods. “Okay, so, when he fell, like... so...” Sean mimics Eduardo’s angle of descent as he carefully steps backwards and begins descending the stairs. “He probably let go of his book almost right away to try and catch himself, right?”

 

Sean reaches into his pocket for his smart phone, and before Mark can even begin to comment, Sean spins on the stairs and lets go of the device. It soars through the air and bounces into the grass next to the stairs.

 

“Seriously?” Mark asks.

 

Sean waves a hand. “That’s the second time I’ve done that in, like, the past hour. It’s fine.”

 

He bounds down the stairs and drops into a crouch next to the phone, peering around at the place where the deck corners into the stairs.

 

“So?” Mark asks, and really, he already knows the answer so he tries to inject as much boredom as possible into his tone.

 

“Nothing,” Sean says, sounding mildly disappointed. “Yet.” He seems to have forgotten that they’re looking for a way to vindicate Eduardo, Sean’s favourite person to torment. Not that Sean didn’t try to be nice to Eduardo in the beginning, mind, but Eduardo’s always been kind of a bitch where he’s concerned and Sean can’t place nice in the sandbox forever.

 

“Yeah.” Mark tries not to feel anything one way or the other about that. He really had known Sean wouldn’t find anything.

 

“I’m just going to stick my arm in that space between the deck and the grass,” Sean calls up to him.

 

Mark thinks this is a singularly bad idea. “I think there are racoons under there.” If Sean gets his arm chewed off, that will be Mark’s second hospital visit this week and he’s definitely not in the mood.

 

There’s a pause. Then Sean says, “I’ll shine my phone around under there first.”

 

“Yes, inform them that you’re coming,” Mark mutters, but he lets Sean get on with it.

 

After another moment of silence, Sean calls, “Nothing.” He climbs to his feet, dusting off his knees, and Mark can just see the top of his head over the edge of the deck. “Guess he was lying, man.”

 

Sean doesn’t sound more than idly entertained by this, as though he’s only been puttering around out here to amuse himself for part of the afternoon. Mark watches him ascend the stairs, wearing that sort of default smug expression that is so familiar, when Sean’s face changes abruptly.

 

“Oh, shit – Mark.”

 

Sean lunges to the edge of the stairs, thrusts his arm through the railing, and struggles for a moment to wrestle something free from behind an ornate flower pot that holds a very dead plant. Sean pulls his arm back through and tosses what’s in his hand to Mark. Mark fumbles the catch and drops it.

 

The book lands on its spine and falls open.

_“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell.”_

 

Mark stops reading after that first line, and it feels like it has been seared into his brain. When he looks up, Sean is grinning at him.

 

“I don’t understand,” Mark says, beginning a question he doesn’t even know has been forming, “why you’re smiling.”

 

“I don’t understand why you’re _not_ ,” Sean replies, clapping Mark on the shoulder as he walks by. “Unless you wanted him to be a suicidal whack-job.”

 

His voice sounds fainter when he gets into the house. “Not that that’s why I’m smiling. You know me and Wardo, bosom buddies and everything, but I just think it’s funny that he accidentally hauled ass off the edge of the porch. You can’t laugh at someone who tries to cash in their own chips, but you can laugh all day if someone does something incredibly retarded.” And fainter still: “I’m gonna have another beer.”

 

Mark remains on the patio, paging through Eduardo’s copy of _The Godfather_ like it will tell him something meaningful about the mess that is his life.

 

\--

 

Dustin’s father has decided to make it through the night, and around four in the morning, Chris gently but firmly drags Dustin away. They both need a drink. Chris has been living under the chill sweep of Mrs. Moskovitz’ gaze all night, and Dustin has been periodically dozing off and then waking up with terrible guilt written all over his face because he’s dared to fall asleep. Chris thinks that they’re probably doing more harm than good hovering around the bed and out in the hallway anyway; the atmosphere is terrible and stifling, and Chris can’t imagine that Mr. Moskovitz, even in his deep sleep, is enjoying it any more than they are.

 

“Where are we going to get a drink at this time of the night, anyway?” Dustin asks, as they practically burst out of the hospital.

 

“No idea,” Chris replies, feeling light and restless after the oppressive state of affairs in Dustin’s father’s hospital room.

 

“We could go back to my house,” Dustin offers. “I don’t have any alcohol there, but my dad drinks this awful black whisky and I don’t think he’s inclined to mind if we abscond with it.”

 

“Abscond,” Chris repeats, grinning a little. “Victorian points?”

 

“ _Yeah._ ” Dustin pumps his fist in the air. “We shall abscond with the whisky of my father and imbibe it post-haste!”

 

Chris snickers. “And we shall not flag or fail.”

 

Dustin runs up onto a nearby parking ramp and raises his fist, having caught on that they were about to have a massive history dork moment. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans!”

 

“Where else?” Chris is smiling as Dustin plants both fists on his hips and looks off into the sky.

 

“We shall fight on the beaches, Christopher,” Dustin tells him solemnly. “We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills...”

 

He leaps down from the ramp and pokes Chris in the chest, giving him a squinty-eyed look. “And we shall _never_ surrender.”

 

“You’re the biggest dork in the entire world,” Chris informs him.

 

“Well, since you can quote Churchill at alarming length exactly like I can, I believe we are dorks together, good sir.” Dustin spins on his heel and marches off across the parking lot. Chris follows, his hands shoved into his pockets, looking deeply amused.

 

They arrive at Dustin’s parents house fifteen minutes later, and Dustin sets off at once in the direction of the room Mr. Moskovitz calls his ‘study’ but is really a storage room that he has manoeuvred a desk into. Chris wanders out onto Dustin’s back deck, un-stacking a couple of the patio chairs that are leaning up against the house and arranging them so that they look out into Dustin’s mother’s garden.  It is too dark to see much of anything, but Chris sort of appreciates the way everything looks white and still in the moonlight.

 

When Dustin returns, Chris takes the bottle from him and sends him back inside for glasses. Dustin protests that they can just drink from the bottle like the tough, manly men that they are, but Chris informs him that when the end of civilization comes, table manners will be the first thing to go. Dustin rolls his eyes, but he turns and ambles cheerfully enough back inside.

 

When at last they are all set up, Chris is sitting up properly in his chair while Dustin sprawls ungracefully in the one next to him, nursing a tumbler that contains much more whisky than is reasonable for any one glass to hold, at least in dignified circles. Chris spins his wrist slowly, making the liquid in his (much less full) glass swirl lazily. They are both satisfied, for a moment, to sit there and listen to the sound of traffic on the distant freeway.

 

Eventually, one or the other of them breaks the silence and they begin a scattered, rambling conversation about nothing in particular. They have always been good at this, just being comfortable in one another’s company. Lately, they have been experiencing the occasional moment of awkwardness, but Dustin, for his part, attributes that to how crazy things have been now that Eduardo has been thrown back into the mix, and Chris would probably agree.

 

As the hour grows later, Dustin keeps filling Chris’ glass despite his protests, and by the time the sun begins to come up, they are both horribly drunk. Chris is better at keeping it in check than Dustin is, but even he is swaying slightly as he leans forward to squint into the sunrise.

 

“I can’t believe we haven’t been to bed yet,” he says, firmly moving his glass to the other side of his chair, out of Dustin’s reach.

 

“Well.” Dustin seems like he’s going to let that be the end of his sentence, until Chris looks at him inquiringly and he hastens to finish: “This was good. I think my dad would like us getting three sheets to the wind on his expensive whisky.”

 

Chris nods, because Dustin’s dad is not like most dads. “I think you’re right.”

 

“Toast,” Dustin says, and he doesn’t seem to notice when Chris gently knuckle-bumps his glass instead of toasting. He is too wary of putting his glass within Dustin’s reach, lest it be filled again.

 

Dustin glances at Chris, watching him speculatively with a kind of openness only obtainable by the very intoxicated. “What’s... what’s gonna happen when you find some, like... GQ-looking guy with a political science degree and you campaign to legalize gay marriage and then it happens and then you get married?”

 

Chris looks momentarily thrown. “GQ-looking guy?  What?”

 

“Yeah. Like...” Dustin sort of flops his hand in the direction of Chris’ button-down shirt. “You know.”

 

“Okay,” Chris says, because he’s not sure where Dustin has gotten the idea that Chris wants some David Beckham-type anyway. Of course he thinks about stuff like that, but it’s like how Dustin pines away after Gina Torres; she might be his fantasy, but in real life, Dustin would be happier with someone who really gets him, someone who’s on his level. “Well, first of all, I’m flattered that you think I would campaign to legalize gay marriage and then it would immediately happen.”

 

“You can do anything, Chris,” Dustin interjects seriously. “For real. Anything.”

 

“Right,” Chris says, because Dustin is being very strange but it’s kind of endearing. “But assuming I did find someone I was interested in and we established something long-term, you’d still be my best friend.”

 

“Would I?” Dustin seems to really want to dig into this scenario. “It wouldn’t be weird?”

 

Chris frowns slightly. “Why would it be weird?”

 

Dustin shrugs. Chris watches him for a long moment; it isn’t until he looks away that Dustin says, “My mom thinks that sharing a room with you all this time and being your friend is going to make it rub off.”

 

“My – gayness?” Chris asks, more amused than offended, because he’s never before heard this much detail about the conversations he knows Dustin and his mom have about him. Dustin usually does his best to shield Chris from the worst of her vitriol. “That’s funny, because _my_ mom was worried that your straightness would rub off on me and I’d stop being able to help her pick out curtains.”

 

Dustin doesn’t even laugh. “I always have to tell her that you can’t _catch_ it. If someone bats for the other team, they bat for the other team. And if they don’t, then they just don’t.”

 

“And if they don’t, then they haven’t seen me pitch,” Chris corrects wryly, cocking a suggestive eyebrow that still garners nothing more than a weak smile from Dustin.

 

“She’s just really awful about it,” Dustin concludes.

 

Chris is starting to wonder whether there’s a reason they are having this conversation now that goes beyond Dustin’s excessive intoxication. “Dustin, what are we talking about here?”

 

“I wouldn’t be your type anyway,” Dustin says, like this explains everything. “I told her that.”

 

“Why wouldn’t you be my type?” Chris asks guardedly.

 

Dustin looks over at him in surprise. His eyes are huge and dark in the watery light from the rising sun. “Look at you,” he says. “You’re the good-looking one. Right? I mean, Wardo cleans up nice and everything but you even look good in your pajamas, even when your pajamas are an Alan Jackson t-shirt and sweatpants.”

 

“And you think my type is ‘some GQ-looking guy’ because I’m shallow?” Chris asks, his eyebrows rising.

 

“ _No_ ,” Dustin answers, because it sounds terrible when Chris puts it like that and Dustin doesn’t mean to insinuate that Chris thinks that way. But then he glances away guiltily, and Chris can read everything in his face, just like always.

 

“You _do_ think that,” he says, amazed and beginning to be insulted. “You think I don’t care about substance.”

 

“ _No_ ,” Dustin insists again, miserable. “That’s not what I meant. I just – some people are good-looking. And those people usually date other good-looking people, because they can. That’s all.”

 

Chris searches his face until he’s satisfied that Dustin is telling the truth. “Okay, then second point of contention. What makes you think that you’re not a good-looking person?”

 

Dustin snorts. “Girls have a tendency to look right through me. I’m not trying to start a pity train or anything. It’s just that either they think I look like a cave troll or I seem like the kind of guy who’s going to stalk them on the internet and kill their pets.”

 

“Even Lauren?” Chris asks.

 

“I broke up with Lauren. She wanted me to get a haircut and take golf lessons.”

 

Chris is a little surprised at that. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

 

“I’m not heartbroken,” Dustin reassures him. “ _Golf lessons_ , are you serious.” He looks so put out that Chris has an absurd urge to laugh.

 

“Well, I’m not a girl,” Chris points out, returning to the original topic, “and I’m your best friend, so I happen to know that you’re not going to stalk me on the internet, nor do I have any pets for you to kill.”

 

“And the cave troll part?” Dustin asks.

 

“Not even close, D-Man,” Chris says, and he means it.

 

“What about my food baby?” Dustin demands, poking the little nerd belly he’s been increasingly self-conscious about since high school. “It demands doughnuts. I try not to give in, but it is a dark and vengeful god.”

 

“Really?” Chris asks. “That’s – you think people look at you and think, _wow, that Dustin sure is the whole package, except for his food baby?_ That’s ridiculous. That’s nobody’s deal-breaker, least of all mine. Besides, if we’re going to get into all of our flaws, I can give you a whole list of things I don’t like about myself. We’ll still be hashing it out at noon, when this hangover starts to kick in.”

 

“What on earth would you not like about yourself?” Dustin asks, flummoxed, and while Chris is flattered, he is also seriously annoyed.

 

“That’s how I feel about _you_ , you total genius,” he says, exasperated. “Nobody looks at themselves through – rose-coloured glasses.”

 

Dustin has no idea when this conversation took a turn for the crazy and he equally has no idea where it’s headed. He thinks he can be forgiven for needing some clarification after eighteen ounces of whiskey. “Okay, so when you say that, it means...”

 

Chris throws up his hands. “Do you even know how hard it is to be the gay best friend?” He demands. They are well and truly having this conversation now and Chris has decided that he’s not going to hold back because it’s too late for that anyway. “You’re not supposed to be attracted to the straight guy, because if you are, you’ll just ruin everything. I’m _trying not to ruin everything_ and you’re _making it hard._ ”

 

“Are you saying you’re attracted to me?” Dustin asks weakly, and Chris rolls his eyes and says, “For _Christ’s_ sake” before he jerks Dustin closer by his sleeve and kisses him.

 

Because of the way they are sitting, the kiss is at a totally awkward angle, and Chris has to reposition himself to save his neck some grief. Dustin flails for a moment before he sort of whimpers and snatches blindly at Chris’ collar, trying to pull him closer.

 

The kiss is sloppy and kind of desperate, but Chris feels something in his gut unclench and realizes that so much of his anxiety lately leads back to _this_ , that he’s done the taboo and fallen for Dustin and now he has to hide it because he doesn’t want it to come between them. Now that his feelings are validated, it’s pretty fucking awesome.

 

Dustin pulls away first, and he looks terrified. “Are we just doing this because we’re drunk?”

 

“Probably,” Chris replies, because he knows if would have taken them _weeks_ longer, maybe more, in Sober-land to figure their shit out. “But I want to do it again when we’re sober.”

 

Dustin looks pleased with that answer. “Can we do it again now?”

 

“Okay, but, I think we should get off of the patio,” Chris answers, feeling light-hearted for the first time in awhile. “Your neighbour’s walked past her kitchen window about eight times now.”

 

As they’re standing up to go inside, Dustin steps forward and initiates a kiss of his own. It’s no neater than the first time, but it’s a jumble of good intentions and electric warmth and Chris is _happy._

 

“What was that for?” He asks, smiling.

 

Dustin steps past him and waves. “Good morning, Mrs. Fletcher!”

 

Chris laughs.

 

Dustin grins in return. “I want everyone to know,” he tells Chris simply.


	11. Change

Once Sean has gone, Mark nudges Eduardo’s book aside on the coffee table where he has left it and opens his laptop.

 

Mark immediately knows that he is not about to accomplish anything. Sometimes this happens, when he starts coding; he can just tell it’s going to be one of those days when he makes mistakes and doesn’t focus very well and doesn’t get much of value done. There’s usually a reason for it – whether he’s feeling under the weather, or something’s bothering him – although he doesn’t find that very comforting. Mark decides to push through anyway on this occasion, but after fifteen frustrating minutes, he slams the lid of his computer down and glares at the book, like it is personally responsible for how ridiculous everything is.

 

_Right,_ he thinks. _Right, I’ll just go tell Wardo I know he wasn’t lying._

 

Once that’s over with, Mark will be able to stop thinking about it every eight damn seconds.

 

With that in mind, Mark snatches up the book and leaves Dustin’s house. The hospital, he decides on his way there, is a loathsome place. He’s pretty sick of spending such superfluous amounts of time there, especially since it’s really starting to interfere with his life and the way he likes to do things. He knows he wasn’t precisely _happy_ when he wasn’t on speaking terms with Eduardo, but at least he wasn’t _miserable_. At least he could still _code._

 

He very suddenly remembers something that his grandfather, purveyor of pithy advice by the boat-load, used to tell him, years and years ago. _If you’re going through hell, keep going._

 

And maybe that’s true, Mark reflects – maybe the only way out is through.

 

On the way up to Eduardo’s floor in the elevator, Mark thinks about all the things he could say to Eduardo. He’s not good at this kind of thing, and he’s not clear on whether Eduardo will feel that an apology is in order for Mark’s lack of faith. Mark decides that he doesn’t think that Eduardo can necessarily blame him for believing the fall from the deck was a second suicide attempt. Then again, now that the incident at Dustin’s house is up in the air, what else is? Mark has a disconcerting moment where he wonders if Eduardo wasn’t lying about the Golden Gate Bridge, either. Maybe that was an accident, too. An unlikely accident, but still. If that’s the case, then Mark has been a total _dick_ this whole time.

 

_Well, Eduardo knew that about me already,_ Mark thinks grimly, as the elevator doors open. _At least he has the advantage of being able to blame me for everything._ He doesn’t even want to imagine the possibility of re-treading the Facebook betrayal, that salted-and-burned earth between them. Last time was such a blow-out that Mark wonders if they’ll ever be ready to talk about it like adults.

 

He is almost at Eduardo’s room when he sees the back of a familiar head. Mark has the unfortunate luck of arriving just as a doctor has finished speaking to Natalia, and she turns as the woman walks away and finds herself face to face with Mark. Mark doesn’t say anything, because he’s really not sure what he can say that will make Natalia back off and not get into this with him, so he just waits her out. It doesn’t take long.

 

“What do you think _you’re_ doing here?” She hisses. “I thought I gave you sufficient warning to _stay the hell away._ ”

 

“I came to see Eduardo,” Mark says honestly. “And I’ve been seeing a lot of him since he got out of the hospital the last time, so you can drop the attitude.”

 

“I don’t care if you and he got matching best friend tattoos since the last time I saw you.” Natalia’s eyes are darker than Eduardo’s, almost black. Mark gets the impression of a shark staring him down. “While I’m here, you’re not welcome. So _walk away._ ”

 

Mark can already tell that he’s not going to get anywhere with her. He and Natalia have similar personalities, although she’s more outwardly aggressive than he is. Chris could probably smooth-talk her into letting him have a few minutes alone with Eduardo, but Mark doesn’t have the skill or the patience.

 

“Can you give him his book, then?” Mark holds out the copy of _The Godfather_ , like it’s just some common library book that Eduardo left lying around and not something imbued with significance.

 

Natalia eyes the book suspiciously, but ultimately she takes it from Mark.

 

“Thanks,” Mark says, and he sort of means it, because Eduardo is going to understand what this means, getting that particular book back from Mark. Mark doesn’t even have to talk to him. Eduardo will just know that Mark knows, and that – that will have to be enough, for now. “He’ll be looking for that.”

 

Natalia just gives him a stiff nod, and Mark, knowing that he has worn out his welcome, takes a step back before he turns on his heel and strolls away down the hall. Natalia’s eyes are on his back the whole way.

 

\--

 

Eduardo notices the book on the night stand right away when he comes back from his x-ray. At a glance, from the doorway, it might be Natalia’s book; when she visits, she does the whole nine yards, staying the night and reading until she passes out in awkward and uncomfortable poses. However, the way it is sitting just precisely so, as though someone put it down with great deliberation, makes Eduardo look again. He recognizes it at once, with a cool feeling that spreads through his abdomen.

 

_Mark was here._

 

Because Dustin and Chris are in Florida, and no one else has access to Eduardo’s things.

 

He does wonder why Mark would bring him a book – or that one, specifically. He’s been reading so many lately that he doesn’t even remember what happened last in whatever one he was reading when he fell. Besides, Mark isn’t known for being the type of guy who considers how boring it must be to spend all day in a hospital bed, wishing for something to do.

 

Later, after buttered toast and jell-o, Eduardo looks at the cover of the book quizzically, flipping through it as though that will provide some inspiration.

 

“Did he say anything?” He asks his sister.

 

She purses her lips without looking up from her magazine. “Just that you’d be looking for it.”

 

Eduardo cranes for the new pair of reading glasses that Natalia bought him and perches them on his face as he resigns himself to opening to the first page and starting to read. Mark doesn’t do anything for no reason. Despite himself, Eduardo really wants to know what it is this time.

 

\--

 

Dustin wakes up at around ten in the morning, driven from sleep by the sunlight seeping through the blinds he didn’t close before he went to bed. Before _they_ went to bed.

 

They didn’t do anything beyond kissing before they passed out together in Dustin’s room, because they were both exhausted and Chris is part-quaint, old-fashioned gentleman inside and doesn’t want to rush anything. But Dustin feels exhilarated to be waking up next to Chris anyway, because this is the dawning of a new day, and it is his first day with everything out in the open. He wants Chris, and Chris wants him. It’s wonderfully simple.

 

He is, however, hungover as hell.

 

Half-rolling out of bed, Dustin stumbles to the closet in search of his hidden cache of Gatorade before remembering that he’s not at home in California and the only thing to be had here is water. With a pained expression, he stumps across the room and disappears into the hallway to retrieve two glasses of beautiful hydration from the bathroom.

 

When he returns, Chris is still asleep, sprawled on his stomach wearing one of Dustin’s old Battlestar t-shirts. Dustin sits on the edge of the bed, swallowing half of his glass of water in one go, and just watches him. The t-shirt has bunched up on one side, and Dustin can see a little triangle of skin and a freckle, or a beauty mark, or whatever people call them, that might actually be the most adorable thing Dustin has ever seen (and Dustin’s seen meerkats, okay, he _knows_ adorable). It also gives him the tinglies in his stomach, which is so ridiculous because he’s known Chris forever and before today he knew how to clamp down on feelings like that before they got out of hand.

 

Almost as though he can sense Dustin’s rapt attention, Chris stirs and squeezes his eyes shut as tightly as they will go.

 

“Good morning,” Dustin says, because Chris is the guy who wakes up immediately, turns off his alarm, and starts his day. He doesn’t lounge around or hit the snooze button eight times like Dustin does.

 

“I’m in so much pain,” Chris mumbles, covering his eyes with his hand.

 

“In college, that much whisky wouldn’t even have made a dent,” Dustin tells him, trying not to laugh. “You’re out of practice.”

 

“Yes. Yes, I am.” Chris buries his face in the pillow, sort of curling in on himself.

 

“Would you like some water?” Dustin sounds sympathetic, but he’s definitely smiling.

 

“Oh God, yes. Please.”

 

Dustin hands Chris the glass he brought for him and watches with amusement as Chris props himself up on one elbow, drains it, and flops back onto his face again. “I love you,” he mumbles into the pillow, his voice muffled.

 

Dustin’s first thought is to immediately skate past Chris’ statement or to make a joke about it before it can get awkward, but even as he’s frantically going over his options, the silence is lengthening and becoming awkward anyway.

 

“Oh, shit.” Chris realizes what he’s done and he’s way too hungover for his PR Guy side to smoothly jump in and save the day for once. Raising himself up onto his elbows, he looks anxiously (if a little blearily) at Dustin. “I’m sorry.”

 

Dustin blinks, because that wasn’t really the follow-up he was expecting. “What are you sorry for?”

 

Chris looks equally surprised by Dustin’s question. “I forgot that – saying that means something different this morning than it did yesterday morning. Or should. I mean, if we’re – if you and I – ” Chris rests his forehead against the heels of hands. “For fuck’s sake. I wish my brain were outputting coherent sentences right now.”

 

“I don’t, it’s hilarious,” Dustin informs him. Really, after the initial weirdness of hearing those words come out of Chris’ mouth in a new context, he’s feeling pretty satisfied about it. “But seriously, bro, I love you, too.”

 

Chris stares at him. “We’re just throwing that around now?”

 

Dustin rolls his eyes. “No, you goof. It’s just that I’ve loved you like a brother since sophomore year. All of you guys. Well, I love Mark more like a weird cousin that you think might secretly belong to a terrorist cell, but same _basic_ principle. So I don’t know why we should stop saying it now just because we decided to – ” He makes an expansive gesture with his arms. “...Take things to the next level.”

 

Chris rolls over onto his back so he can properly look at Dustin. He looks like he’s getting ready for a debate of some kind. “If this is going to be more than best friend-love, then we need to take it more seriously.”

 

“I’m not disagreeing with that,” Dustin says, “but I love you and I’m going to say it if I want to.” Chris tries to interrupt, but Dustin plows right over him. “Mark might murder me for something at some point in the near future, or I might murder him and go to prison, and in either case we should not be leaving important shit unsaid. On that note, you should also know that the shirt I generally wear to big-ticket meetings that you always say looks weirdly familiar is totally yours. I borrowed it for our first-ever shareholder’s meeting because you never wore it anyway, and then it fit me so I ripped the tag out and kept it.”

 

“You _deviant_ ,” Chris accuses.

 

“That’s me,” Dustin replies cheerfully.

 

“Degenerate,” Chris adds, reaching over and pushing lightly on Dustin’s arm.

 

“I feel like you’re searching out d-words for alliterative purposes,” Dustin informs him.

 

“ _Delinquent,_ ” Chris says.

 

“Okay, now that one was wounding.”

 

Chris closes his fingers around Dustin’s wrist and pulls him toward him. “I just don’t want to fall into the trap of saying ‘I love you’ just because we’re used to it.”

 

Dustin is pretty sure that Chris’ chest is his new favourite place to lean against. “I’m not even worried, Magic.”

 

“No?” Chris looks down, even as Dustin tips his chin up to meet his gaze.

 

“Being me and you is like, the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” Dustin tells him.

 

\--

 

Eduardo liked it better the first time, when the hospital staff _told_ him that he was a mental case who needed constant supervision. Now they’re doing it again, but they’re stealthier about it, which in a way makes it even more annoying. Eduardo used to be able to count on the room checks at regular intervals; now it’s always a surprise.

 

He knows that they’re trying him out on different anti-depressants too, because he recognizes the feeling of ‘settling in’ to new medication and for the first handful of nights, he doesn’t sleep very well. He also has an uncharacteristic outburst at a nurse, for which he later apologizes so profusely that she looks embarrassed.

 

Natalia does as she always does; after she stays a couple of days and confirms for herself that he is going to be taken care of for the next little while, she vanishes. Their father was like that, too, Eduardo remembers very well. Family comes a very narrow first. After that, business is paramount – and Natalia loves her job, everything from the competitive nature of it to the paycheque, so she doesn’t stick around. She does promise to be back, but she is vague on when.

 

Eduardo already knows that if he called her at any time of the day or night and told her he was leaving the hospital and intended to stay with Mark, she would fly back in a heartbeat. He’s surer now than he used to be that she’s mainly upset at Mark because of the slight to the family, rather than the personal slight to Eduardo. It’s not that she doesn’t care about his welfare – she really does – but at some point over the past couple of years, she has become very like their father and Eduardo has drifted away.

 

It’s not as though Eduardo would want to stay with Mark, anyway. The last time they spoke was the bitter argument that began with Mark accusing Eduardo of lying about his fall, and escalated into a knock-down, drag-out affair about Facebook. Oddly, Eduardo feels almost lighter since it happened. His shrink, Doctor Rosetanni, thinks (or seems to think, anyway; Eduardo’s never very clear on what her actual thoughts are because she’s so subtle at steering him this way and that during their conversations) that Eduardo needed to get all of that baggage off of his chest. Eduardo doesn’t doubt that, but he thinks that another contributing factor may be that he doesn’t have to tip-toe around Mark anymore, guessing what Mark would shout at him given the chance but not really _knowing_. Now they know precisely where they stand with one another. It’s _freedom_. Eduardo thinks that he likes it, or he will, anyway, when the vestiges of hurt and anger disappear entirely. 

 

He does, however, spend most of his free time during his stay at the hospital manfully working his way through _The Godfather_ , looking in vain for clues as to why Mark might have left it. He would just write it off as a half-assed goodwill gesture of apology from anyone else, but Mark isn’t prone to those. Eduardo doesn’t think that Mark would just cut down the awful Facebook-shaped elephant in the room by flinging everything awful he’s ever thought about Eduardo into his face, and then come by with an _I’m-Sorry_ library book. Eduardo isn’t about to call Mark and find out, though. He’s had it with chasing Mark around Harvard, and then chasing him across the country, and now chasing him around Palo Alto. If Mark wants to talk to him, Mark can make it happen.

 

Eduardo has time to finish the book and read half a dozen news magazines cover-to-cover before his medical team gives him a clean bill of health (well, in a manner of speaking; he still needs to come in for physiotherapy and to visit Doctor Rosetanni, and he’s still not walking, but he’s allowed out on his own like an adult person, and that feels pretty good). He gathers that his conversations with his shrink prompted her to give him the psychiatric all-clear, because he has never been anything less than totally honest with her and he thinks she knows that he’s not in the frame of mind where he wants to recreate The Fall. She believes him when he fervently insists that the tumble from the deck wasn’t a suicide attempt. Chris and Dustin, too, seem to be on his side when he tells them exactly what happened.

 

“You’re in, like, the top five of smartest people I know, so I’m pretty sure you didn’t think that a fall down five steps would be lethal instead of just incredibly painful,” Dustin tells him over the phone from Florida.

 

“ _Thank_ you,” Eduardo says feelingly.

 

“Did you... uh. Did you talk to Mark? Recently?”

 

Eduardo says that he hasn’t. He doesn’t even want to talk about Mark, and they change the subject.

 

Dustin tells him that he’s welcome to stay at his place even as Dustin and Chris remain down south, and Eduardo thanks him for the offer, but he thinks he wants some measure of independence for a little while. He doesn’t have any plans for the immediate future, but it’s kind of refreshing: He doesn’t have any plans, so he can do anything he wants.

 

On the morning he’s due to leave the hospital, he spends fifteen minutes on his hair and carefully chooses a shirt from the assortment of button-downs Natalia brought him to choose from. Some of them are from the luggage he brought with him for the shareholder’s meeting, which feels like forever ago now, but some of them date from Harvard; Eduardo left them at his parents’ house in Florida at some point or another during his travels, and now it’s like unpacking a nostalgia trip. He feels weirdly emotional about it, like choosing one of those shirts is going to be more meaningful than choosing one he’s purchased more recently. He can’t say whether that’s because the shirts remind him of a time when he felt more sure about his path through the world, or because they remind him of home and his parents (even his father), or because they make him think of rushing back to Boston for a meeting on Facebook’s expansion strategy with Mark, back before things had had a chance to get twisted between them.

 

The last thing he does before he leaves is to tuck his father’s ring into the pocket of his slacks. At Harvard he never took it off, but he hasn’t been wearing it since before his father died. When he returned to Miami for the funeral, his mother had handed him the unopened envelope – the same one he’d mailed to his father months before – without saying anything. At first, Eduardo had left it in the bottom of his suitcase because it was a reminder of everything he didn’t need to be thinking about. His father had given it to him right around the time of his bar mitzvah, and said something so throw-away, so cliché, like _make me proud_. But it had stuck with Eduardo since, swirling around in his head, and so after the fallout over Facebook, the ring became a symbol of all the things he could never do to satisfy the old man. Once The Fall happened, when it had seemed to Eduardo as though he’d turned a corner in his grief for (and rage _at_ , he was surprised to discover) his father, he had considered putting it on again.

 

Mark would have said it was ridiculous. _Death always makes people into saints, Wardo. It’s fucking stupid. He wasn’t anything close._

 

Eduardo can practically hear Mark’s rapid-fire rebuke in his head, even as he thinks to himself: _It wasn’t easy being his son. But that’s what I was. What I am._

 

But Eduardo couldn’t have worn it even if he’d made up his mind to do it, because the hand he usually wears it on is the one with the damaged wrist, and the bandages prevent him from putting it on. It doesn’t feel right to put it on the other hand, so he doesn’t wear it. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, or why he feels compelled to carry it around, but he does. Maybe one day it will be okay to either wear it again or put it away forever.

 

As he wheels himself slowly down the corridor with his belongings gathered into a small bundle on his lap, Eduardo has a feeling of certainty that he’s leaving all of this behind for the last time. He’s going to have to start figuring things out for himself again. He’s pretty sure that that’s going to be okay, because he has all kinds of talents and knacks for things that he can put to good use, and for the first time in awhile, he wants to have people around. He’s always wanted people around, of course, because Eduardo doesn’t have the personality to be solitary for huge chunks of time, like Mark does. But he spent a few months, maybe even a year or two, where he got very good at deciding not to bother with people and ushering them quietly out of his daily life. He thinks now that he’s going to be brave and let people in again, maybe one or two at a time. If there are people around, he has voices to listen to other than his own.

 

Besides, spending time with Chris and Dustin (and even Mark) has reminded him of what it’s like to have a close circle of friends. It turns out that it’s not a hassle to have people who will check up on you and invite you into their homes and ask after you. Eduardo forgot what that was like. He had managed to mostly convince himself that letting people get close allowed them the opportunity they needed to fucking _damage_ you, but it feels like mistrusting Chris and Dustin for all this time has kind of been just a convenient way not to have to deal with his Facebook-related feelings in general and Mark specifically. And Mark... well, Eduardo doesn’t know what he’s going to do about Mark, but it doesn’t feel quite so much like Mark burned his house down and salted the earth. Now Eduardo can look back in more detail, because the past has another layer over it, more encounters with Mark and the others that colour Eduardo’s perception of how things turned out. It is not a raw, jagged, fractured thing; not anymore.

 

When he gets out of the hospital, he calls a cab company that can accommodate his accessibility requirements and waits in the sunshine for them to arrive. He has the driver take him to a hotel he’s never stayed in before and when he gets to his room, he spends some time figuring out how to navigate his mobility issues. He does have a handicap-accessible bathroom, and he’s sort of getting the hang of leveraging himself out of the chair using his core and his arms (even the damaged one can hold a little bit of weight, if he’s careful about how he distributes it and keeps it near the elbow). He’s certain that he’s going to be able to learn how to walk again. The doctors never said he wouldn’t, after all.

 

Otherwise he is pretty sure he would be in a much darker place.

 

He and Doctor Rosetanni haven’t really discussed it much, since Eduardo’s got about eighteen other kinds of baggage that needed to be sifted through first since it accumulated first. The inability to walk... well, Eduardo isn’t going to let that be permanent.

 

\--

 

“Sorry, Mark. He wasn’t really clear about his plans and he didn’t seem to want you to know about them.” Chris tries to duck away from Dustin, who is nosing under his ear, trying to kiss the side of his neck. It’s distracting, and he doesn’t want it to read in his voice.

 

“You’re supposed to tell me these things,” Mark argues.

 

“This isn’t one of those scenarios where you’re my boss,” Chris points out gently. “I’m just your friend right now. I’m also Eduardo’s friend, and he seemed to want some space.”

 

“I don’t understand why he didn’t call me after I gave him the book,” Mark says, because it does not compute, not at all.

 

“You – what?” Chris puts a hand directly on Dustin’s face and pushes him away; he determinedly looks the other way as Dustin makes wide-eyed, hilarious expressions through Chris’ spread fingers.

 

“The book, I gave him the book.” Mark realizes that this isn’t going to be logical to Chris, who probably didn’t get more than the Coles notes of what went down between him and Eduardo, so he explains the origin of the book and why it means that Eduardo should have contacted Mark by now.

 

“So, hang on.” Chris sounds wary and incredulous. “You accused him of something he didn’t do, then let it devolve into a fight about Facebook, which I _told_ you not to get into with him yet. Then you found proof that he didn’t do what you accused him of and gave that proof to his sister, who despises the very space you occupy. _Mark_.”

 

Beside Chris, Dustin is facepalming.

 

“What,” Mark says impatiently.

 

“Maybe his sister never gave him the book. Maybe he got the book but doesn’t understand what it means. Maybe he’s pissed off that you falsely accused him of attempting suicide and then thought you could apologize by handing off proof that he didn’t do it – which he already knows, by the way – to a third party. Maybe he just wanted you to have a little _faith_.” Chris is dangerously close to facepalming, himself. “You have an I.Q. high enough to run NASA and literally none of these things occurred to you, did they?”

 

“They occurred to me,” Mark defends. There is the briefest of silences before he adds, “I just thought he would call.”

 

“I know you did.” Chris feels genuinely sympathetic, although he’s not sure whether it’s for Mark or Eduardo. “Maybe it’s time you made the first move.”

 

“With the implication that it’s Eduardo who generally makes the first move,” Mark concludes from that, sounding faintly incredulous.

 

“If you call him and it turns out to be a mistake, I’ll take full responsibility,” Chris promises, ignoring Mark’s statement because it would take weeks to explain to Mark how his relationship with Eduardo is weird and unhealthy in basically every way Chris can think of, but when it’s going right, it seems to make both of them ridiculously happy for no sane reason anyone can pinpoint. “Listen, I have to go. But just call him and explain your – ridiculous book logic. It’s Eduardo, he’ll understand your weird shit. He always does.”

 

“Explain to me why I hired you when all you do is insult me,” Mark complains.

 

“Because literally no one else would do the job I do for the salary you pay me,” Chris informs him.

 

“Don’t you work for Obama or something?”

 

“Go call Eduardo, Mark.”

 

Mark disconnects without saying anything else, and Dustin lets out a huge sigh like he’s been holding his breath for the entire conversation.

 

“Holy sweet baby Jesus. Every time I think my life is a mess, I look at Mark and Eduardo and think, oh right, that’s what a train wreck looks like.”

 

Chris glances at him. “And then you don’t think your life is so terrible?”

 

“Oh, I still think my life is a mess, but the kind where you call, like, Maid in California, not the Chernobyl-looking dudes in hazmat suits.”

 

Chris chuckles. “Right. Speaking of messes...” He glances back over his shoulder. Mrs. Moskovitz is passed out in a chair next to her husband’s bed. He can just see the top of her head, tipped down and resting on her shoulder. Dustin’s sister, Brianna, has gone home to get some sleep in a real bed, but her mother can’t be persuaded to do the same.

 

“She’ll come around Chris,” Dustin reassures him, immediately reading his mind. “I promise.”

 

Chris isn’t so sure, but he keeps that to himself. “When are you going to tell her?”

 

Dustin bites his lip, also looking back at his mother now. “When all this stuff with my dad is – over, I guess. For better or for worse.”

 

Chris gently draws his hand away from Dustin’s, settling it back in his own lap. “So until then, we have to act like everything’s the same as it was before.”

 

Dustin looks genuinely at a loss. “I don’t want to. But I can’t tell her yet, she’ll be – well, you know how she is. And she’s already in a not-so-awesome headspace because of my dad.”

 

“I’m not upset,” Chris tells him, because he’s really not. “I understand, D-Man. Trust me, I get it.”

 

Dustin has an odd, brief glimpse of a younger Chris, then; the one that waited for months to tell his roommates he was gay, expressing some vague but heartfelt excuse about having to hide it everywhere he’d been before Harvard. It makes Dustin inexplicably _so sad_. Glancing over his shoulder at his sleeping mother again, Dustin very deliberately reaches for Chris’ hand. Two orderlies march past; neither one gives them a second look.

 

“We can be anything we want while she’s sleeping,” Dustin says earnestly, and Chris gives him a strangely grateful little smile when he adds, “And someday soon, we can be anything we want no matter what.”


	12. Flicker

After talking to Chris, Mark doesn’t expect Eduardo to pick up when he calls. It’s strangely disconcerting when, after the eighth or ninth ring (long after the time when Mark would usually have hung up), there is a click and then the silence of an open line. Eduardo doesn’t say anything, but Mark can tell he’s there.

 

“Wardo,” Mark says, business-like, and there’s a hitched intake of breath that makes Mark suddenly wary and uncertain. “You – it’s Mark.”

 

“I know,” Eduardo says, and his voice sounds small and overwhelmed. Mark thinks he detects a hint of a break there too.

 

“You sound upset,” Mark says, and then he wants to slap himself, because _thank_ you, Captain super fucking Obvious.

 

Eduardo expels a breath, and Mark hears quiet noises, like Eduardo is shifting around. “I wasn’t going to answer. I knew it was you and you’re – the most fucking useless person to talk to about anything.”

 

“I am not,” Mark says, offended.

 

“Yes, you are,” Eduardo tells him. “But I... Jesus. What if...”

 

He’s struggling, and Mark has no idea where he’s going with this, so he can’t even help. “Wardo, what if what?”

 

“What if I don’t walk again?” Eduardo says, like the words are being dragged out of somewhere deep that he never intended Mark to see. He takes a shuddering breath. “What I never... what if it never gets better?”

 

Mark wants to say a million things, not least of which is the less-than-kind, _well, you did it to yourself._ But he doesn’t, because he’s not nineteen years old anymore and he’s got some life experience under his belt that indicates that losing people you care about is easy, but getting them back is the hardest thing in the world. Especially when you’re terrible at apologies (and Mark is the very worst).

 

“Tell me where you are,” he says instead, and Eduardo does.

 

\--

 

When Mark arrives twenty minutes later, he finds that the door has been left ajar. Taking that as a sign, he just walks in without knocking and switches on a light. Eduardo is curled on his side on the bed, facing away from Mark. He doesn’t indicate that he’s aware of Mark’s presence, so Mark travels around the foot of the bed so he can see Eduardo’s face.

 

Eduardo is leaking water out of his eyes and it looks serious.

 

(Seriously, okay, Mark knows they’re called tears but that makes them sound so _dramatic_ , and like something a five-year-old would do. Eduardo’s not crying like a five-year-old, unless there are five-year-olds Mark doesn’t know about who lost their father very recently and just let the realization sink in that they might be wheelchair-bound forever.)

 

“Wardo,” Mark says desperately, and he’s just standing in front of him with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his hoodie because he literally has zero idea of what he’s supposed to do right now.

 

“If you tell me not to cry, I’m going to brain you with the alarm clock,” Eduardo promises, wiping a hand roughly under one eye.

 

“Okay.” _Well,_ Mark thinks, _That’s some direction. I guess._ He’s still at a loss, so he does the most straight-forward thing he can think of. “What do you want me to do right now?”

 

“I really want you to not have to ask me that question.” Eduardo isn’t even looking at Mark, and there’s still moisture bubbling over in his eyes.

 

“Well.” Mark gives a one-shouldered shrug. “This is how I am. You picked that, you know.”

 

“I picked what?” Eduardo asks, and he does look at Mark now, confused.

 

Mark’s not sure how Eduardo never noticed this before. “You were a tall, dark, and handsome Harvard undergrad with money and zero ability to be mean to people. Your best friend could’ve been anyone on campus.”

 

Eduardo’s gaze skitters away again. “Did you ever think that we... that we should’ve... did you ever want more than that? From me?”

 

Mark looks at him carefully for a long moment. He knows what Eduardo means, or thinks he does, but he doesn’t think about these things for as long as he can bury them because Mark doesn’t know how to be heartbroken so he’d rather just be cold.

 

“Sometimes I feel like we fucked everything up,” Eduardo says quietly, by way of explanation, and a tear rolls down from his eye and buries itself in his hair.

 

Mark abruptly sits down on the edge of the bed. If he over-thinks what he’s about to do - or say - he won’t do it. He is silent for a moment, contemplating what Eduardo has said. “We did fuck everything up.”

 

Eduardo wraps his sleeve over his hand and dabs at his face, soaking up moisture. “Where do we go from here, then?”

 

Mark shrugs. This, he knows the answer to. “Did you get the book?”

 

Eduardo freezes. “Yes.”

 

Mark promptly throws everything Chris told him out the window and focuses an irritated gaze on Eduardo. “Didn’t you understand what I meant?”

 

Eduardo stares at him. His eyes are enormous and swimming in the dim hotel-quality light. “You left me a random book. It was cryptic?” Now he sounds more like the version of himself that is happy to argue with Mark.

 

“It was not _cryptic_ ,” Mark says, exasperated. “When you fell off of Dustin’s deck, you said that you went outside to read. I didn’t believe you. And then I found your book, the one you were reading in the few days before you fell, in Dustin’s back yard and I knew that you were telling the truth.”

 

Eduardo processes this. “I forgot that that was the book I was reading,” he says dully, like it’s a let-down to know the truth after all this time. Mark didn’t have a message for him that went any deeper then, _oh, look, proof that you’re not a liar._

 

Eduardo already knows that he’s not a liar, thanks.

 

Except the next thing that Mark says throws him entirely for a loop. “Maybe you didn’t jump off the bridge, either,” Mark says quietly, and Eduardo stares at him, thunderstruck.

 

“Mark, what?” He can’t manage anything else, because Mark is the last person that Eduardo thought would be on his side, only it’s not his side anymore.

 

“You didn’t jump off the Golden Gate,” Mark says, more steadily.

 

Eduardo swallows, because what comes next will be the hardest part yet, somehow, and if he gets through it, he will be in the clear. “I really did.”

 

“No,” Mark says, a frown stealing across his face. “Wardo, you don’t have to – ”

 

“I’m not,” Eduardo snaps. Then, softer: “I’m not. I’m not saying that because people have convinced me. I just... know that it’s true.”

 

Mark doesn’t look like he understands, and Eduardo’s still not sure that he does, either. But he decides to take a credible stab at explaining what he knows.

 

“I don’t remember it at all, and it still seems foreign and unbelievable to me that I would ever – take the easy way out like that. But I do remember what I felt like before it happened, and it just... it wasn’t good, Mark. Everything was...” He gestures helplessly. “Heavy. I’m not going to invalidate how I felt by saying that things have never been bad enough that I’ve contemplated just not dealing with them anymore. Things _were_ that bad. Maybe I just... maybe I saw an opportunity and took it.”

 

Mark nods, although Eduardo can’t tell if that means he understands or if he’s just acknowledging that these things are being processed in that scarily efficient brain of his. After a moment, Mark says, “What about now?”

 

Eduardo’s brows knit faintly. “What do we do now?” He tries to clarify.

 

“No.” Mark looks sidelong at him. “How do you _feel_ now.”

 

“Oh.” Eduardo drags himself upright as well as he can, leaning against the headboard of the bed and doing his best to sop away the remaining tears on his face with his sleeve. Mark doesn’t ask questions like that. Or the Mark he knew at Harvard didn’t, but Eduardo is starting to get the feeling that, just as he is different, Mark is different, too. They have both simply had the time to get older.

 

“I feel...” He rests his temple lightly against the inside of his wrist, not sure how he wants to say this. “What was there is mostly gone,” he says. “The not wanting to do anything or talk to anyone, that’s gone.” He grimaces. “It’s – the impact knocked it loose, I guess. And I’m not mad at – at my _pai_ anymore, and maybe I feel... I – you know, better about what happened between you and me, too. I got tired of being - fucking _furious_  about it, honestly. It wears you down.”

 

“I know what it does.” Because Mark has rowed that boat with Eduardo the whole way down.

 

“Yeah.” Eduardo knows that, too; it just got easy to lose sight of it. “There was so much other baggage that came rushing in when my father died that it pushed the stuff with you out of the way a little bit."

 

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Mark says, because he hasn’t expressed any sympathies yet, and it’s time.

 

“Yeah.” Eduardo gives a small, shaky, bittersweet smile. “No, you’re not, are you?”

 

“I’m sorry that his death was hard on you.” That part is not a lie.

 

Eduardo shakes his head slightly. “I never...” He looks off into the nothingness to the left of the lamplight, like he can remember the way things happened, precisely and visually. “I thought you two were so much alike, you would get along like a – house on fire. That you’d understand each other.”

 

“We did understand each other,” Mark replies. “That is precisely why we didn’t get along.”

 

“Well, he and I were not alike at all, and we didn’t get along either,” Eduardo says, with a sad smile. “Maybe it was just him.”

 

“Maybe,” Mark agrees.

 

“What insight did you have that I didn’t?”  Eduardo is surprised that it is less painful to ask the question than he previously would have thought; maybe he really _has_ gained a better understanding of his relationship with his father.

 

“Oh, please.” Mark’s eyes flicker toward Eduardo and away, and Eduardo is surprised to see that Mark is _annoyed_. “It wasn’t insight. You would have a twenty-minute phone conversation wherein you spent the entire time defending yourself, and then you would study yourself into a coma. You were falling asleep in your classes and getting sick.”

 

“I only ever spoke to him in Portuguese,” Eduardo says, suddenly anxious, because he never meant for Mark to overhear those conversations and ascribe any meaning to them.

 

Mark gives him a look. “I have an I.Q. in the genius range and a perfect score on my SATs, I think I can be trusted to pick up on things like body language and tone of voice. Besides, Portuguese isn’t Mandarin; anyone with any background in Latin-based languages could pick up a word here and there.”

 

“I don’t want you think that was all he was to me,” Eduardo says, surprised to find he sounds desperate.

 

“He can be whatever you need him to be,” Mark answers patiently. “But I know what kind of man he was, and you don’t owe him any pedestals.”

 

Eduardo doesn’t know that he agrees with Mark on anything he’s just said, but he’s conflicted about it too, and if he’s honest with himself, he’s tired of fighting. He’s especially tired of fighting with Mark.

 

“Will you help me?” He doesn’t specify with what, but he thinks that Mark can discern well enough on his own that Eduardo’s going to need it for the foreseeable future.

 

“I don’t know,” Mark says honestly, because he can’t tell yet if it’s going to be enough, this fragile understanding between them. “Probably. Is that good enough?”

 

Eduardo considers it. “Okay,” he says at last, because he’ll take it, he’ll take _Mark_ , however he can.

 

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so, we arrive at the end! Or the new beginning, I guess, for Mark and Eduardo. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who read this story, and especially to everyone who left kudos and comments. An extra giant thank you to Coyotebee and K-Maart, without whom this would not have been written (or at least completed). 
> 
> I'm debating whether or not to write an epilogue at this point; I have some ideas in mind, but I don't want to pull a Rowling and finish with an epilogue so blatantly terrible that you all want to throw things at me. What do we think? Epilogue? Oui? Non? Toaster?


	13. Closure (The Epilogue)

It is one of those muggy days at the beginning of August when everyone feels sluggish and disinclined, and Eduardo thinks, _Nothing significant ever happens on a day like this._

There's a low wall that runs around the outside of the cemetery, and Eduardo is sitting on it, feeling the ache in his arms recede a little. His hand crutches are sort of a double-edged sword, because on the one hand it is _blissful_ to be able to walk _anywhere_ , even short distances - it feels like the first real, marked progress Eduardo has made - but on the other hand, now his hands are always occupied and his arms are always sore. The left one - the one he broke (or re-broke) months ago now, almost a year - starts to bother him much sooner than the other one does, which he supposes is to be expected. He overcompensates a lot and that's hard on his good arm, too. 

But he's gotten this far. So there's that.

The cemetery where his father is buried is set back from the road and guarded by a row of thick, towering willows that muffle the noise of the occasional car passing by on the suburban road beyond. Eduardo feels like the trees hold in the oppressive warmth of the sun, too, but he doesn't mind very much. Eduardo's always thrived in the kind of heat that makes your shirt stick to your back and mirages glimmer like water on flat, unbroken stretches of highway. Besides, after four winters in Boston, he wouldn't complain about unduly hot weather anyway.

The headstone he came to visit is maybe four rows back from where he's sitting, and he can only see the top corner from here, but that's okay. He already knows what the face of it looks like, could draw every last imperfection in the granite from memory, and he knows the inscription like he knows his own name:

_Ricardo Saverin_  
 _1948-2007_

And then, in Hebrew:

_Servant of God_

Eduardo had stumbled over the last part the first time he had read it; he hadn't had occasion to read or write Hebrew for years. He had wondered at the choice to include that inscription and nothing in Portuguese, but then, Eduardo supposes that his father's family were Jewish before they were Brazilian; that they carried that identity closest to their hearts when they fled the trauma of wartime Europe to build a new life halfway across the world.

Eduardo's built a new life several times now. He wonders if it's genetic, that adaptability. Certainly, he thinks, he could go anywhere and learn how to exist. 

But maybe it's harder to go anywhere and learn how to be happy.

"I hate Miami."

Eduardo smiles despite himself. Mark _would_ hate Miami. 

"You didn't have to come," he points out, half-twisting so that he can see Mark, sprawled on the grass under one of the willows.

Mark doesn't say anything.

Eduardo turns back to the rows of tombstones and wonders about checks and balances, about whether the universe - or God, the one Ricardo Saverin served or any other - keeps track of what you've lost and makes sure you get something back, a kind of way of making sure you aren't given any burdens you can't carry. Eduardo thinks about all the uncertainty of the past few months, of the way his body has been healing painfully slowly and the way his relationship with Mark is unsteady and often tenuous, of the way he still grieves for his father and tries to navigate his own sometimes fragile mental landscape.

A lot of things have happened. But Mark is here in Miami, providing a kind of - well, if it weren't Mark, Eduardo would have said _moral support_ , although because it _is_ Mark, he more or less acts like he got here by accident. So if Mark's presence is Eduardo's sign from the universe that sometimes you get some trade-in value on the bullshit in your life, he'll definitely take it.

They aren't best friends again yet.

But at least Eduardo can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

"Dustin wants to know if we've seen any zombies," Mark informs him, squinting at his smart phone.

"None that I've noticed," Eduardo replies, and he doesn't turn around or let Mark know he's kind of smiling a little.

"Chris says it's disrespectful to have asked. Of course he does. Dustin says..." Mark pauses. "He's looking out for our personal safety. Do we need a shotgun, please advise."

Eduardo glances over his shoulder. "Dustin owns a shotgun, does he?"

Mark's mouth quirks. He's still lying on his back, scrolling through his phone. "No. Chris might."

"Why?" Eduardo is legitimately amused now. "Because he's from the South?"

"Don't underestimate that. At Harvard he sang Hank Williams in the shower, and once he mentioned driving a tractor like it was totally normal."

Eduardo actually laughs. It should feel odd to do that in the cemetery where his father rests twenty feet away, but for some reason, it feels like the right way to make sure he can walk past the old man's long, long shadow.

"I told Dustin to stand down," Mark remarks after a moment. "He seems disappointed."

"It's way too hot to fight zombies," Eduardo replies. "Tell him to go find some air conditioning or something."

As he watches, Mark shudders and tosses his phone Eduardo's way. "I'm not equipped to deal with this."

Eduardo catches the phone against his chest and eyes the screen:

_To: Maaark_  
 _From: D-Man_

_chris just took his shirt off. THANK U SUMMER_

Eduardo tosses the phone back. "You'd better answer, or the next text is going to have a photo attachment."

Mark's eye twitches, and he immediately begins typing away. Eduardo grins to himself, because trust Dustin to still know the best ways to wind Mark up, even unintentionally, and trust Mark to let it happen. 

It's almost like those early days back at Harvard, except that this time around, Chris and Dustin have become Chris-and-Dustin, which Eduardo, looking back on it, is frankly surprised none of them saw coming, not even the parties involved. 

And this time around, Eduardo doesn't have to worry and wonder about Mark, because they've been tried by fire, _Eduardo_ has been tried by fire, and Mark was still waiting on the other side. Reluctant, difficult, and sometimes unkind, but still there.

Eduardo puts his trust in that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had anxiety about posting this, you guys. It's been collecting dust since I wrote it in February. I didn't want to post an epilogue just for the sake of posting an epilogue, and I didn't want it to suck and introduce Mark/Eduardo's children with bizarre names. So hopefully that was what at least some of you were looking for (hence the title 'Closure'!) and for the rest of you, I hope it didn't ruin anything for you. Rave on, rave on everybody!


End file.
